In the Mountains

By Elizabeth Von Arnim

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Title: In the Mountains


Author: Elizabeth von Arnim



Release Date: January 25, 2011  [eBook #35072]
Most recently updated: February 25, 2011

Language: English


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IN THE MOUNTAINS***


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IN THE MOUNTAINS

by

THE AUTHOR OF "ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN"







Macmillan and Co., Limited
St. Martin's Street, London
1920




IN THE MOUNTAINS


_July 22nd._

I want to be quiet now.

I crawled up here this morning from the valley like a sick
ant,--struggled up to the little house on the mountain side that I
haven't seen since the first August of the war, and dropped down on the
grass outside it, too tired even to be able to thank God that I had got
home.

Here I am once more, come back alone to the house that used to be so
full of happy life that its little wooden sides nearly burst with the
sound of it. I never could have dreamed that I would come back to it
alone. Five years ago, how rich I was in love; now how poor, how
stripped of all I had. Well, it doesn't matter. Nothing matters. I'm too
tired. I want to be quiet now. Till I'm not so tired. If only I can be
quiet....


_July 23rd._

Yesterday all day long I lay on the grass in front of the door and
watched the white clouds slowly passing one after the other at long,
lazy intervals over the tops of the delphiniums,--the row of delphiniums
I planted all those years ago. I didn't think of anything; I just lay
there in the hot sun, blinking up and counting the intervals between one
spike being reached and the next. I was conscious of the colour of the
delphiniums, jabbing up stark into the sky, and of how blue they were;
and yet not so blue, so deeply and radiantly blue, as the sky. Behind
them was the great basin of space filled with that other blue of the
air, that lovely blue with violet shades in it; for the mountain I am on
drops sharply away from the edge of my tiny terrace-garden, and the
whole of the space between it and the mountains opposite brims all day
long with blue and violet light. At night the bottom of the valley looks
like water, and the lamps in the little town lying along it like
quivering reflections of the stars.

I wonder why I write about these things. As if I didn't know them! Why
do I tell myself in writing what I already so well know? Don't I know
about the mountain, and the brimming cup of blue light? It is because,
I suppose, it's lonely to stay inside oneself. One has to come out and
talk. And if there is no one to talk to one imagines someone, as though
one were writing a letter to somebody who loves one, and who will want
to know, with the sweet eagerness and solicitude of love, what one does
and what the place one is in looks like. It makes one feel less lonely
to think like this,--to write it down, as if to one's friend who cares.
For I'm afraid of loneliness; shiveringly, terribly afraid. I don't mean
the ordinary physical loneliness, for here I am, deliberately travelled
away from London to get to it, to its spaciousness and healing. I mean
that awful loneliness of spirit that is the ultimate tragedy of life.
When you've got to that, really reached it, without hope, without
escape, you die. You just can't bear it, and you die.


_July 24th._

It's queer the urge one has to express oneself, to get one's self into
words. If I weren't alone I wouldn't write, of course, I would talk. But
nearly everything I wanted to say would be things I couldn't say. Not
unless it was to some wonderful, perfect, all-understanding
listener,--the sort one used to imagine God was in the days when one
said prayers. Not quite like God though either, for this listener would
sometimes say something kind and gentle, and sometimes, stroke one's
hand a little to show that he understood. Physically, it is most blessed
to be alone. After all that has happened, it is most blessed. Perhaps I
shall grow well here, alone. Perhaps just sitting on these honey-scented
grass slopes will gradually heal me. I'll sit and lick my wounds. I do
so dreadfully want to get mended! I do so dreadfully want to get back to
confidence in goodness.


_July 25th._

For three days now I've done nothing but lie in the sun, except when
meals are put in the open doorway for me. Then I get up reluctantly,
like some sleepy animal, and go and eat them and come out again.

In the evening it is too cold and dewy here for the grass, so I drag a
deep chair into the doorway and sit and stare at the darkening sky and
the brightening stars. At ten o'clock Antoine, the man of all work who
has looked after the house in its years of silence during the war, shuts
up everything except this door and withdraws to his own room and his
wife; and presently I go in too, bolting the door behind me, though
there is nothing really to shut out except the great night, and I creep
upstairs and fall asleep the minute I'm in bed. Indeed, I don't think
I'm much more awake in the day than in the night. I'm so tired that I
want to sleep and sleep; for years and years; for ever and ever.

There was no unpacking to do. Everything was here as I left it five
years ago. We only took, five years ago, what each could carry, waving
goodbye to the house at the bend of the path and calling to it as the
German soldiers called to their disappearing homes, 'Back for
Christmas!' So that I came again to it with only what I could carry, and
had nothing to unpack. All I had to do was to drop my little bag on the
first chair I found and myself on to the grass, and in that position we
both stayed till bedtime.

Antoine is surprised at nothing. He usedn't to be surprised at my
gaiety, which yet might well have seemed to him, accustomed to the
sobriety of the peasant women here, excessive; and nor is he now
surprised at my silence. He has made a few inquiries as to the health
and whereabouts of the other members of that confident group that waved
goodbyes five years ago, and showed no surprise when the answer, at
nearly every name, was 'Dead.' He has married since I went away, and
hasn't a single one of the five children he might have had, and he
doesn't seem surprised at that either. I am. I imagined the house, while
I was away, getting steadily fuller, and used to think that when I came
back I would find little Swiss babies scattered all over it; for, after
all, there quite well might have been ten, supposing Antoine had
happened to possess a natural facility in twins.


_July 26th._

The silence here is astonishing. There are hardly any birds. There is
hardly any wind, so that the leaves are very still and the grass
scarcely stirs. The crickets are busy, and the sound of the bells on
distant cows pasturing higher up on the mountains floats down to me; but
else there is nothing but a great, sun-flooded silence.

When I left London it was raining. The Peace Day flags, still hanging
along the streets, drooped heavy with wet in what might have been
November air, it was so dank and gloomy. I was prepared to arrive here
in one of the mountain mists that settle down on one sometimes for
days,--vast wet stretches of grey stuff like some cold, sodden blanket,
muffling one away from the mountains opposite, and the valley, and the
sun. Instead I found summer: beautiful clear summer, fresh and warm
together as only summer up on these honey-scented slopes can be, with
the peasants beginning to cut the grass,--for things happen a month
later here than down in the valley, and if you climb higher you can
catch up June, and by climbing higher and higher you can climb, if you
want to, right back into the spring. But you don't want to if you're me.
You don't want to do anything but stay quiet where you are.


_July 27th._

If only I don't think--if only I don't think and remember--how can I not
get well again here in the beauty and the gentleness? There's all next
month, and September, and perhaps October too may be warm and golden.
After that I must go back, because the weather in this high place while
it is changing from the calms of autumn to the calms of the exquisite
alpine winter is a disagreeable, daunting thing. But I have two whole
months; perhaps three. Surely I'll be stronger, tougher, by then? Surely
I'll at least be better? I couldn't face the winter in London if this
desperate darkness and distrust of life is still in my soul. I don't
want to talk about my soul. I hate to. But what else am I to call the
innermost _Me,_ the thing that has had such wounds, that is so much hurt
and has grown so dim that I'm in terror lest it should give up and go
under, go quite out, and leave me alone in the dark?


_July 28th._

It is dreadful to be so much like Job.

Like him I've been extraordinarily stripped of all that made life
lovely. Like him I've lost, in a time that is very short to have been
packed so full of disasters, nearly everything I loved. And it wasn't
only the war. The war passed over me, as it did over everybody, like
some awful cyclone, flattening out hope and fruitfulness, leaving blood
and ruins behind it; but it wasn't only that. In the losses of the war,
in the anguish of losing one's friends, there was the grisly comfort of
companionship in grief; but beyond and besides that life has been
devastated for me. I do feel like Job, and I can't bear it. It is so
humiliating, being so much stricken. I feel ridiculous as well as
wretched; as if somebody had taken my face and rubbed it in dust.

And still, like Job, I cling on to what I can of trust in goodness, for
if I let that go I know there would be nothing left but death.


_July 29th._

Oh, what is all this talk of death? To-day I suddenly noticed that each
day since I've been here what I've written down has been a whine, and
that each day while I whined I was in fact being wrapped round by
beautiful things, as safe and as perfectly cared for _really_ as a baby
fortunate enough to have been born into the right sort of family.
Oughtn't I to be ashamed? Of course I ought; and so I am. For, looking
at the hours, each hour as I get to it, they are all good. Why should I
spoil them, the ones I'm at now, by the vivid remembrance, the aching
misery, of those black ones behind me? They, anyhow, are done with; and
the ones I have got to now are plainly good. And as for Job who so much
haunted me yesterday, I can't really be completely like him, for at
least I've not yet had to take a potsherd and sit down somewhere and
scrape. But perhaps I had better touch wood over that, for one has to
keep these days a wary eye on God.

Mrs. Antoine, small and twenty-five, who has been provided by Antoine,
that expert in dodging inconveniences, with a churn suited to her size
out of which she produces little pats of butter suited to my size every
day, Switzerland not having any butter in it at all for sale,--Mrs.
Antoine looked at me to-day when she brought out food at dinner time,
and catching my eye she smiled at me; and so I smiled at her, and
instantly she began to talk.

Up to now she has crept about softly on the tips of her toes as if she
were afraid of waking me, and I had supposed it to be her usual fashion
of moving and that it was natural to her to be silent; but to-day, after
we had smiled at each other, she stood over me with a dish in one hand
and a plate in the other, and held forth at length with the utmost
blitheness, like some carolling blacks bird, about her sufferings, and
the sufferings of Antoine, and the sufferings of everybody during the
war. The worse the sufferings she described had been the blither became
her carollings; and with a final chirrup of the most flute-like
cheerfulness she finished this way:

_'Ah, ma foi, oui--il y avait un temps où il a fallu se fier entièrement
au bon Dieu. C'était affreux._'


_July 30th._

It's true that the worst pain is the remembering one's happiness when
one is no longer happy and perhaps it may be just as true that past
miseries end by giving one some sort of satisfaction. Just their being
over must dispose one to regard them complacently. Certainly I already I
remember with a smile and a not unaffectionate shrug troubles that
seemed very dreadful a few years back. But this--this misery that has
got me now, isn't it too deep, doesn't it cut too ruthlessly at the very
roots of my life ever to be something that I will smile at? It seems
impossible that I ever should. I think the remembrance of this year will
always come like a knife cutting through any little happiness I may
manage to collect. You see, what has happened has taken away my faith in
_goodness_,--I don't know who _you_ are that I keep on wanting to tell
things to, but I must talk and tell you. Yes; that is what it has done;
and the hurt goes too far down to be healed. Yet I know time is a queer,
wholesome thing. I've lived long enough to have found that out. It is
very sanitary. It cleans up everything. It never fails to sterilise and
purify. Quite possibly I shall end by being a wise old lady who
discourses with, the utmost sprightliness, after her regular meals, on
her past agonies, and extracts much agreeable entertainment from them,
even is amusing about them. You see, they will be so far away, so safely
done with; never, anyhow, going to happen again. Why of course in time,
in years and years, one's troubles must end by being entertaining. But I
don't believe, however old I am and however wisely hilarious, I shall
ever be able to avoid the stab in the back, the clutch of pain at the
heart, that the remembrance of beautiful past happiness gives one. Lost.
Lost. Gone. And one is still alive, and still gets up carefully every
day, and buttons all one's buttons, and goes down to breakfast.


_July 31st._

Once I knew a bishop rather intimately--oh, nothing that wasn't most
creditable to us both--and he said to me, 'Dear child, you will always
be happy if you are good.'

I'm afraid he couldn't have been quite candid, or else he was very
inexperienced, for I have never been so terribly good in the bishop's
sense as these last three years, turning my back on every private wish,
dreadfully unselfish, devoted, a perfect monster of goodness. And
unhappiness went with me every step of the way.

I much prefer what some one else said to me, (not a bishop but yet
wise,) to whom I commented once on the really extraordinary bubbling
happiness that used to wake up with me every morning, the amazing joy of
each day as it came, the warm flooding gratitude that I _should_ be so
happy,--this was before the war. He said, beginning also like the bishop
but, unlike him, failing in delicacy at the end, 'Dear child, it is
because you have a sound stomach.'


_August 1st._

The last first of August I was here was the 1914 one. It was just such a
day as this,--blue, hot, glorious of colour and light. We in this house,
cut off in our remoteness from the noise and excitement of a world
setting out with cries of enthusiasm on its path of suicide, cut off by
distance and steepness even from the valley where the dusty Swiss
soldiers were collecting and every sort of rumour ran like flames, went
as usual through our pleasant day, reading, talking, clambering in the
pine-woods, eating romantic meals out in the little garden that hangs
like a fringe of flowers along the edge of the rock, unconscious,
serene, confident in life. Just as to-day the delphiniums stood
brilliantly blue, straight, and motionless on this edge, and it might
have been the very same purple pansies crowding at their feet. Nobody
came to tell us anything. We were lapped in peace. Of course even up
here there had been the slight ruffle of the Archduke's murder in June,
and the slight wonder towards the end of July as to what would come of
it; but the ruffle and the wonder died away in what seemed the solid,
ever-enduring comfortableness of life. Such comfortableness went too
deep, was too much settled, too heavy, to make it thinkable that it
should ever really be disturbed. There would be quarrels, but they would
be localised. Why, the mere feeding of the vast modern armies would
etc., etc. We were very innocent and trustful in those days. Looking
back at it, it is so pathetic as to be almost worthy of tears.

Well, I don't want to remember all that. One turns with a sick weariness
from the recollection. At least one is thankful that we're at Now and
not at Then. This first of August has the great advantage of having all
that was coming after that first of August behind it instead of ahead of
it. At least on this first of August most of the killing, of the
slaughtering of young bodies and bright hopes, has left off. The world
is very horrible still, but nothing can ever be so horrible as killing.


_August 2nd._

The only thing to do with one's old sorrows is to tuck them up neatly in
their shroud and turn one's face away from their grave towards what is
coming next.

That is what I am going to do. To-day I have the kind of feelings that
take hold of convalescents. I hardly dare hope it, but I have done
things to-day that do seem convalescent; done them and liked doing them;
things that I haven't till to-day had the faintest desire to do.

I've been for a walk. And a quite good walk, up in the forest where the
water tumbles over rocks and the air is full of resin. And then when I
got home I burrowed about among my books, arranging their volumes and
loving the feel of them. It is more than ten days since I got here, and
till to-day I haven't moved; till to-day I've lain about with no wish to
move, with no wish at all except to have no wish. Once or twice I have
been ashamed of myself; and once or twice into the sleepy twilight of
my mind has come a little nicker of suspicion that perhaps life still,
after all, may be beautiful, that it may perhaps, after all, be just as
beautiful as ever if only I will open my eyes and look. But the flicker
has soon gone out again, damped out by the vault-like atmosphere of the
place it had got into.

To-day I do feel different; and oh how glad I'd be if I _could_ be glad!
I don't believe there was ever anybody who loved being happy as much as
I did. What I mean is that I was so acutely conscious of being happy, so
appreciative of it; that I wasn't ever bored, and was always and
continuously grateful for the whole delicious loveliness of the world.

I think it must be unusual never to have been bored. I realise this when
I hear other people talk. Certainly I'm never bored as people sometimes
appear to be by being alone, by the absence of amusement from without;
and as for bores, persons who obviously were bores, they didn't bore me,
they interested me. It was so wonderful to me, their unawareness that
they were bores. Besides, they were usually very kind; and also,
shameful though it is to confess, bores like me, and I am touched by
being liked, even by a bore. Sometimes it is true I have had to take
temporary refuge in doing what Dr. Johnson found so convenient,
--withdrawing my attention, but this is dangerous because of the
inevitable accompanying glazed and wandering eye. Still, much can be
done by practice in combining coherency of response with private
separate meditation.

Just before I left London I met a man whose fate it has been for years
to sit daily in the Law Courts delivering judgments, and he told me that
he took a volume of poetry with him--preferably Wordsworth--and read in
it as it lay open on his knees under the table, to the great refreshment
and invigoration of his soul; and yet, so skilled had he become in the
practice of two attentivenesses, he never missed a word that was said or
a point that was made. There are indeed nice people in the world. I did
like that man. It seemed such a wise and pleasant thing to do, to lay
the dust of those sad places, where people who once liked each other go
because they are angry, with the gentle waters of poetry. I am sure that
man is the sort of husband whose wife's heart gives a jump of gladness
each time he comes home.


_August 3rd._

These burning August days, when I live in so great a glory of light and
colour that it is like living in the glowing heart of a jewel, how
impossible it is to keep from gratitude. I'm so grateful to be here, to
_have_ here to come to. Really I think I'm beginning to feel
different--remote from the old unhappy things that were strangling me
dead; restored; almost as though I might really some day be in tune
again. There's a moon now, and in the evenings I get into a coat and lie
in the low chair in the doorway watching it, and sometimes I forget for
as long as a whole half hour that the happiness I believed in is gone
for ever. I love sitting there and feeling little gusts of scent cross
my face every now and then, as if some one had patted it softly in
passing by. Sometimes it is the scent of the cut grass that has been
baking all day in the sun, but most often it is the scent from a group
of Madonna lilies just outside the door, planted by Antoine in one of
the Septembers of the war.

'_C'est ma maman qui me les a donnés_,' he said; and when I had done
expressing my joy at their beauty and their fragrance, and my
appreciation of his _maman's_ conduct in having made my garden so lovely
a present, he said that she had given them in order that, by brewing
their leaves and applying the resulting concoction at the right moment,
he and Mrs. Antoine might be cured of suppurating wounds.

'But you haven't got any suppurating wounds,' I said, astonished and
disillusioned.

'_Ah, pour ça non_,' said Antoine. '_Mais il ne faut pas attendre qu'on
les a pour se procurer le remède._'

Well, if he approaches every future contingency with the same prudence
he must be kept very busy; but the long winters of the war up here have
developed in him, I suppose, a Swiss Family Robinson-like ingenuity of
preparation for eventualities.

What lovely long words I've just been writing. I can't be as
convalescent as I thought. I'm sure real vigour is brief. You don't say
Damn if your vitality is low; you trail among querulous, water-blooded
words like regrettable and unfortunate. But I think, perhaps, being in
my top layers very adaptable, it was really the elderly books I've been
reading the last day or two that made me arrange my language along their
lines. Not old books,--elderly. Written in the great Victorian age, when
the emotions draped themselves chastely in lengths, and avoided the rude
simplicities of shorts.

There is the oddest lot of books in this house, pitchforked together by
circumstances, and sometimes their accidental rearrangement by Antoine
after cleaning their shelves each spring of my absence would make their
writers, if they could know, curdle between their own covers. Some are
standing on their heads--Antoine has no prejudices about the right side
up of an author--most of those in sets have their volumes wrong, and
yesterday I found a Henry James, lost from the rest of him, lost even,
it looked like, to propriety, held tight between two ladies. The ladies
were Ouida and Ella Wheeler Wilcox. They would hardly let him go, they
had got him so tight. I pulled him out, a little damaged, and restored
him, ruffled in spite of my careful smoothing, to his proper place. It
was the _Son and Brother_; and there he had been for months, perhaps
years, being hugged. Dreadful.

When I come down to breakfast and find I am a little ahead of the _café
au lait_, I wander into the place that has most books in it--though
indeed books are in every place, and have even oozed along the
passages--and fill up the time, till Mrs. Antoine calls me, in rescue
work of an urgent nature. But it is impossible, I find, to tidy books
without ending by sitting on the floor in the middle of a great
untidiness and reading. The coffee grows cold and the egg repulsive, but
still I read. You open a book idly, and you see:

_The most glaring anomalies seemed to afford them no intellectual
inconvenience, neither would they listen to any arguments as to the
waste of money and happiness which their folly caused them. I was
allowed almost to call them life-long self-deceivers to their faces, and
they said it was quite true, but that it did not matter._

Naturally then you read on.

You open another book idly, and you see:

_Our admiration of King Alfred is greatly increased by the fact that we
know very little about him._

Naturally then you read on.

You open another book idly, and you see:

_Organic life, we are told, has developed gradually from the protozoon
to the philosopher, and this development, we are assured, is indubitably
an advance. Unfortunately it is the philosopher, not the protozoon, who
gives us this assurance._

Naturally then you read on.

You open--but I could go on all day like this, as I do go on being
caught among the books, and only the distant anxious chirps of Mrs.
Antoine, who comes round to the front door to clear away breakfast and
finds it hasn't been begun, can extricate me.

Perhaps I had better not get arranging books before breakfast. It is too
likely to worry that bird-like Mrs. Antoine, who is afraid, I daresay,
that if I don't drink my coffee while it is hot I may relapse into that
comatose condition that filled her evidently with much uneasiness and
awe. She hadn't expected, I suppose, the mistress of the house, when she
did at last get back to it, to behave like some strange alien slug,
crawled up the mountain only to lie motionless in the sun for the best
part of a fortnight. I heard her, after the first two days of this
conduct, explaining it to Antoine, who however needed no explanation
because of his god-like habit of never being surprised, and her
explanation was that _c'était la guerre_,--convenient explanation that
has been used to excuse many more unnatural and horrible things during
the last five years than somebody's behaving as if she were a slug.

But, really, the accidental juxtapositions on my bookshelves! Just now I
found George Moore (his _Memories of my Dead Life,_ with its delicate
unmoralities, its delicious paganism) with on one side of him a book
called _Bruey: a Little Worker for Christ_, by Frances Ridley Havergal,
and on the other an American book called _The Unselfishness of God, and
How I Discovered It._

The surprise of finding these three with their arms, as it were, round
each other's necks, got me nearer to laughter than I have been for
months. If anybody had been with me I _would_ have laughed. Is it
possible that I am so far on to-day in convalescence that I begin to
want a companion? Somebody to laugh with? Why, if that is so....

But I'd best not be too hopeful.


_August 4th._

This day five years ago! What a thrill went through us up here, how
proud we felt of England, of belonging to England; proud with that
extraordinary intensified patriotism that lays hold of those who are not
in their own country.

It is very like the renewal of affection, the re-flaming up of love, for
the absent. The really wise are often absent; though, indeed, their
absences should be arranged judiciously. Too much absence is very nearly
as bad as too little,--no, not really very nearly; I should rather say
too much has its drawbacks too, though only at first. Persisted in
these drawbacks turn into merits; for doesn't absence, prolonged enough,
lead in the end to freedom? I suppose, however, for most people complete
freedom is too lonely a thing, therefore the absence should only be just
long enough to make room for one to see clear again. Just a little
withdrawal every now and then, just a little, so as to get a good view
once more of those dear qualities we first loved, so as to be able to
see that they're still there, still shining.

How can you see anything if your nose is right up against it? I know
when we were in England, enveloped in her life at close quarters,
bewildered by the daily din of the newspapers, stunned by the cries of
the politicians, distracted by the denouncements, accusations, revilings
with which the air was convulsed, and acutely aware of the background of
sad drizzling rain on the pavements, and of places like Cromwell Road
and Shaftesbury Avenue and Ashley Gardens being there all the time,
never different, great ugly houses with the rain dripping on them,
gloomy temporary lodgings for successive processions of the noisy
dead,--I know when we were in the middle of all this, right up tight
against it, we couldn't see, and so we forgot the side of England that
was great.

But when she went to war we were not there; we had been out of her for
months, and she had got focussed again patriotically. Again she was the
precious stone set in a silver sea, the other Eden, demi-Paradise, the
England my England, the splendid thing that had made splendid poets, the
hope and heart of the world. Long before she had buckled on her
sword--how easily one drops into the old language!--long before there
was any talk of war, just by sheer being away from her we had
re-acquired that peculiar aggressive strut of the spirit that is
patriotism. We liked the Swiss, we esteemed them; and when we crossed
into Italy we liked the Italians too, though esteeming them less,--I
think because they seemed less thrifty and enjoyed themselves more, and
we were still sealed up in the old opinion that undiscriminating joyless
thrift was virtuous. But though we liked and esteemed these people it
was from a height. At the back of our minds we always felt superior, at
the back of our minds we were strutting. Every day of further absence
from England, our England, increased that delicious sub-conscious
smugness. Then when on the 4th of August she 'came in,' came in
gloriously because of her word to Belgium, really this little house
contained so much enthusiasm and pride that it almost could be heard
cracking.

What shall we do when we all get to heaven and aren't allowed to have
any patriotism? There, surely, we shall at last be forced into one vast
family. But I imagine that every time God isn't looking the original
patriotism of each will break out, right along throughout eternity; and
some miserable English tramp, who has only been let into heaven because
he positively wasn't man enough for hell, will seize his opportunity to
hiss at a neat Swiss business man from Berne, whose life on earth was
blamelessly spent in the production of cuckoo-clocks, and whose
mechanical-ingenuity was such that he even, so ran the heavenly rumours
among the mild, astonished angels, had propagated his family by
machinery, that he, the tramp, is a b--Briton, and if he, the
b--b--b--Swiss (I believe tramps always talk in b's; anyhow newspapers
and books say they do), doubts it, he'd b--well better come outside and
he, the tramp, will b--well soon show him.

To which the neat Berne gentleman, on other subjects so completely
pervaded by the local heavenly calm, will answer with a sudden furious
mechanical buzzing, much worse and much more cowing to the tramp than
any swear-words, and passionately uphold the might and majesty of
Switzerland in a prolonged terrific _whrrrrr._


_August 5th._

I want to talk. I must be better.


_August 6th._

Of course, the most battered, the most obstinately unhappy person
couldn't hold out for ever against the all-pervading benediction of this
place. I know there is just the same old wretchedness going on as usual
outside it,--cruelty, people wantonly making each other miserable, love
being thrown away or frightened into fits, the dreadful betrayal of
trust that is the blackest wretchedness of all,--I can almost imagine
that if I were to hang over my terrace-wall I would see these well-known
dreary horrors crawling about in the valley below, crawling and tumbling
about together in a ghastly tangle. But at least there isn't down there
now my own particular contribution to the general wretchedness. I
brought that up here; dragged it up with me, not because I wanted to,
but because it would come. Surely, though, I shall leave it here? Surely
there'll be a day when I'll be able to pack it away into a neat bundle
and take it up to the top of some, arid, never-again-to-be-visited rock,
and leave it there and say, 'Goodbye. I'm separate. I've cut the
umbilical cord. Goodbye old misery. Now for what comes next.'

I can't believe this won't happen. I can't believe I won't go back down
the mountain different from what I was when I came. Lighter, anyhow, and
more wholesome inside. Oh, I do so _want_ to be wholesome inside again!
Nicely aired, sunshiny; instead of all dark, and stuffed up with black
memories.


_August 7th._

But I am getting on. Every morning now when I wake and see the patch of
bright sunshine on the wall at the foot of my bed that means another
perfect day, my heart goes out in an eager prayer that I may not
disgrace so great a blessing by private gloom. And I do think each of
these last days has been a little less disgraced than its yesterday.
Hardly a smudge, for instance, has touched any part of this afternoon. I
have felt as though indeed I were at last sitting up and taking notice.
And the first thing I want to do, the first use I want to make of having
turned the corner, is to talk.

How feminine. But I love to talk. Again how feminine. Well, I also love
to listen. But chiefly I love to listen to a man; therefore once more,
how feminine. Well, I'm a woman, so naturally I'm feminine; and a man
does seem to have more to say that one wants to hear than a woman. I do
want to hear what a woman has to say too, but not for so long a time,
and not so often. Not nearly so often. What reason to give for this
reluctance I don't quite know, except that a woman when she talks seems
usually to have forgotten the salt. Also she is apt to go on talking;
sometimes for quite a little while after you have begun to wish she
would leave off.

One of the last people who stayed here with me alone in 1914, just
before the arrival of the gay holiday group of the final days, was a
woman of many gifts--_le trop est l'ennemi du bien_--who started,
therefore, being full of these gifts and having eloquently to let them
out, talking at the station in the valley where I met her, and didn't,
to my growing amazement and chagrin, for I too wanted to say some
things, leave off (except when night wrapped her up in blessed silence)
till ten days afterwards, when by the mercy of providence she swallowed
a crumb wrong, and so had to stop.

How eagerly, released for a moment, I rushed in with as much as I could
get out during the brief time I knew she would take to recover! But my
voice, hoarse with disuse, had hardly said three sentences--miserable
little short ones--when she did recover, and fixing impatient and
reproachful eyes on me said:

'Do you _always_ talk so much?'

Surely that was unjust?


_August 8th._

Now see what Henry James wrote to me--to _me_ if you please! I can't get
over it, such a feather in my cap. Why, I had almost forgotten I had a
cap to have a feather in, so profound has been my humbling since last I
was here.

In the odd, fairy-tale like way I keep on finding bits of the past, of
years ago, as though they were still of the present, even of the last
half hour, I found the letter this morning in a room I wandered into
after breakfast. It is the only room downstairs besides the hall, and I
used to take refuge in it from the other gay inhabitants of the house so
as to open and answer letters somewhere not too distractingly full of
cheerful talk; and there on the table, spotlessly kept clean by Antoine
but else not touched, were all the papers and odds and ends of five
years back exactly as I must have left them. Even some chocolate I had
apparently been eating, and some pennies, and a handful of cigarettes,
and actually a box of matches,--it was all there, all beautifully
dusted, all as it must have been when last I sat there at the table. If
it hadn't been for the silence, the complete, sunny emptiness and
silence of the house, I would certainly have thought I had only been
asleep and having a bad dream, and that not five years but one uneasy
night had gone since I nibbled that chocolate and wrote with those pens.

Fascinated and curious I sat down and began eating the chocolate again.
It was quite good; made of good, lasting stuff in that good, apparently
lasting age we used to live in. And while I ate it I turned over the
piles of papers, and there at the bottom of them was a letter from Henry
James.

I expect I kept it near me on the table because I so much loved it and
wanted to re-read it, and wanted, I daresay, at intervals proudly to
show it to my friends and make them envious, for it was written at
Christmas, 1913; months before I left for England.

Reading it now my feeling is just astonishment that I, _I_ should ever
have had such a letter. But then I am greatly humbled; I have been on
the rocks; and can't believe that such a collection of broken bits as I
am now could ever have been a trim bark with all its little sails puffed
out by the kindliness and affection of anybody as wonderful as Henry
James.

Here it is; and it isn't any more vain of me now in my lamed and bruised
condition to copy it out and hang on its charming compliments than it is
vain for a woman who once was lovely and is now grown old to talk about
how pretty she used to be:

                             21 Carlyle Mansions,

                               Cheyne Walk, S.W.,

                                     December 29th, 1913.



Dear--

Let me tell you that I simply delight in your beautiful and generous and
gracious little letter, and that there isn't a single honeyed word of it
that doesn't give me the most exquisite pleasure. You fill the
measure--and how can I tell you how I _like_ the measure to be filled?
None of your quarter-bushels or half-bushels for _my_ insatiable
appetite, but the overflowing heap, pressed down and shaken together
and spilling all over the place. So I pick up the golden grains and
nibble them one by one! Truly, dear lady, it is the charmingest rosy
flower of a letter--handed me straight out of your monstrous snowbank.
That you can grow such flowers in such conditions--besides growing with
such diligence and elegance all sorts of other lovely kinds, has for its
explanation of course only that you have such a regular teeming garden
of a mind. You must mainly inhabit it of course--with your other courts
of exercise so grand, if you will, but so grim. Well, you have caused me
to revel in pride and joy--for I assure you that I have let myself go;
all the more that the revelry of the season here itself has been so far
from engulfing me that till your witching words came I really felt
perched on a mountain of lonely bleakness socially and sensuously
speaking alike--very much like one of those that group themselves, as I
suppose, under your windows. But I have had my Xmastide _now_, and am
your all grateful and faithful and all unforgetting old Henry James.

       *       *       *       *       *

Who wouldn't be proud of getting a letter like that? It was wonderful to
come across it again, wonderful how my chin went up in the air and how
straight I sat up for a bit after reading it. And I laughed, too; for
with what an unbuttoned exuberance must I have engulfed him! 'Spilling
all over the place.' I can quite believe it. I had, I suppose, been
reading or re-reading something of his, and had been swept off sobriety
of expression by delight, and in that condition of emotional
unsteadiness and molten appreciation must have rushed impetuously to the
nearest pen.

How warmly, with what grateful love, one thinks of Henry James. How
difficult to imagine anyone riper in wisdom, in kindliness, in wit;
greater of affection; more generous of friendship. And his talk, his
wonderful talk,--even more wonderful than his books. If only he had had
a Boswell! I did ask him one day, in a courageous after-dinner mood, if
he wouldn't take me on as his Boswell; a Boswell so deeply devoted that
perhaps qualifications for the post would grow through sheer admiration.
I told him--my courageous levity was not greater on that occasion than
his patience--that I would disguise myself as a man; or better still,
not being quite big enough to make a plausible man and unlikely to grow
any more except, it might be hoped, in grace, I would be an elderly
boy; that I would rise up early and sit up late and learn shorthand and
do anything in the world, if only I might trot about after him taking
notes--the strange pair we should have made! And the judgment he passed
on that reckless suggestion, after considering its impudence with much
working about of his extraordinary mobile mouth, delivering his verdict
with a weight of pretended self-depreciation intended to crush me
speechless,--which it did for nearly a whole second--was: 'Dear lady, it
would be like the slow squeezing out of a big empty sponge.'


_August 9th._

This little wooden house, clinging on to the side of the mountain by its
eyelashes, or rather by its eyebrows, for it has enormous eaves to
protect it from being smothered in winter in snow that look exactly like
overhanging eyebrows,--is so much cramped up for room to stand on that
the garden along the edge of the rock isn't much bigger than a
handkerchief.

It is a strip of grass, tended with devotion by Antoine, whose pride it
is that it should be green when all the other grass on the slopes round
us up the mountain and down the mountain are parched pale gold; which
leads him to spend most of his evening hours watering it. There is a low
wall along the edge to keep one from tumbling over, for if one did
tumble over it wouldn't be nice for the people walking about in the
valley five thousand feet below, and along this wall is the narrow
ribbon of the only flowers that will put up with us.

They aren't many. There are the delphiniums, and some pansies and some
pinks, and a great many purple irises. The irises were just over when I
first got here, but judging from the crowds of flower-stalks they must
have been very beautiful. There is only one flower left; exquisite and
velvety and sun-warmed to kiss--which I do diligently, for one must kiss
something--and with that adorable honey-smell that is the very smell of
summer.

That's all in the garden. It isn't much, written down, but you should
just see it. Oh yes--I forgot. Round the corner, scrambling up the wall
that protects the house in the early spring from avalanches, are crimson
ramblers, brilliant against the intense blue of the sky. Crimson
ramblers are, I know, ordinary things, but you should just see them. It
is the colour of the sky that makes them so astonishing here. Yes--and I
forgot the lilies that Antoine's _maman_ gave him. They are near the
front door, and next to them is a patch of lavender in full flower now,
and all day long on each of its spikes is poised miraculously something
that looks like a tiny radiant angel, but that flutters up into the sun
when I go near and is a white butterfly. Antoine must have put in the
lavender. It used not to be there. But I don't ask him because of what
he might tell me it is really for, and I couldn't bear to have that
patch of sheer loveliness, with the little shining things hovering over
it, explained as a _remède_ for something horrid.

If I could paint I would sit all day and paint; as I can't I try to get
down on paper what I see. It gives me pleasure. It is somehow
companionable. I wouldn't, I think, do this if I were not alone. I would
probably exhaust myself and my friend pointing out the beauty.

The garden, it will be seen, as gardens go, is pathetic in its smallness
and want of variety. Possessors of English gardens, with those immense
wonderful herbaceous borders and skilfully arranged processions of
flowers, might conceivably sniff at it. Let them. I love it. And, if it
were smaller still, if it were shrunk to a single plant with a single
flower on it, it would perhaps only enchant me the more, for then I
would concentrate on that one beauty and not be distracted by the
feeling that does distract me here, that while I am looking one way I am
missing what is going on in other directions. Those beasts in
Revelations--the ones full of eyes before and behind--I wish I had been
constructed on liberal principles like that.

But one really hardly wants a garden here where God does so much. It is
like Italy in that way, and an old wooden box of pansies or a pot of
lilies stuck anywhere, in a window, on the end of a wall, is enough;
composing instantly with what is so beautifully there already, the
light, the colour, the shapes of the mountains. Really, where God does
it all for you just a yard or two arranged in your way is enough; enough
to assert your independence, and to show a proper determination to make
something of your own.


_August 10th._

I don't know when it is most beautiful up here,--in the morning, when
the heat lies along the valley in delicate mists, and the folded
mountains, one behind the other, grow dimmer and dimmer beyond sight,
swooning away through tender gradations of violets and greys, or at
night when I look over the edge of the terrace and see the lights in the
valley shimmering as though they were reflected in water.

I seem to be seeing it now for the first time, with new eyes. I know I
used to see it when I was here before, used to feel it and rejoice in
it, but it was entangled in other things then, it was only part of the
many happinesses with which those days were full, claiming my attention
and my thoughts. They claimed them wonderfully and hopefully it is true,
but they took me much away from what I can only call for want of a
better word--(a better word: what a thing to say!)--God. Now those hopes
and wonders, those other joys and lookings-forward and happy trusts are
gone; and the wounds they left, the dreadful sore places, are slowly
going too. And how I see beauty now is with the new sensitiveness, the
new astonishment at it, of a person who for a long time has been having
awful dreams, and one morning wakes up and the delirium is gone, and he
lies in a state of the most exquisite glad thankfulness, the most
extraordinary minute appreciation of the dear, wonderful common things
of life,--just the sun shining on his counterpane, the scents from the
garden coming in through his window, the very smell of the coffee being
got ready for breakfast. Oh, delight, delight to think one didn't die
this time, that one isn't going to die this time after all, but is going
to get better, going to live, going presently to be quite well again and
able to go back to one's friends, to the people who still love one....


_August 11th._

To-day is a saint's day. This is a Catholic part of Switzerland, and
they have a great many holidays because they have a great many saints.
There is hardly a week without some saint in it who has to be
commemorated, and often there are two in the same week, and sometimes
three. I know when we have reached another saint, for then the church
bells of the nearest village begin to jangle, and go on doing it every
two hours. When this happens the peasants leave off work, and the busy,
saint-unencumbered Protestants get ahead.

Mrs. Antoine was a Catholic before she married, but the sagacious
Antoine, who wasn't one, foreseeing days in most of his weeks when she
might, if he hadn't been quite kind, to her, or rather if she fancied
he hadn't been quite kind to her--and the fancies of wives, he had
heard, were frequent and vivid--the sagacious Antoine, foreseeing these
numerous holy days ahead of him on any of which Mrs. Antoine might
explain as piety what was really pique and decline to cook his dinner,
caused her to turn Protestant before the wedding. Which she did;
conscious, as she told me, that she was getting a _bon mari qui valait
bien ça_; and thus at one stroke Antoine secured his daily dinners
throughout the year and rid himself of all his wife's relations. For
they, consisting I gather principally of aunts, her father and mother
being dead, were naturally displeased and won't know the Antoines; which
is, I am told by those who have managed it, the most refreshing thing in
the world: to get your relations not to know you. So that not only does
he live now in the blessed freedom and dignity that appears to be
reserved for those whose relations are angry, but he has no priests
about him either. Really Antoine is very intelligent.

And he has done other intelligent things while I have been away. For
instance:

When first I came here, two or three years before the war, I desired to
keep the place free from the smells of farmyards. 'There shall be no
cows,' I said.

'_C'est bien_,' said Antoine.

'Nor any chickens.'

'_C'est bien_' said Antoine.

'Neither shall there be any pigs.'

'_C'est bien_,' said Antoine.

'_Surtout_', I repeated, fancying I saw in his eye a kind of private
piggy regret, '_pas de porcs_.'

'_C'est bien_,' said Antoine, the look fading.

For most of my life up to then had been greatly infested by pigs; and
though they were superior pigs, beautifully kept, housed and fed far
better, shameful to relate, than the peasants of that place, on the days
when the wind blew from where they were to where we were, clean them and
air them as one might there did come blowing over us a great volume of
unmistakeable pig. Eclipsing the lilies. Smothering the roses. Also, on
still days we could hear their voices, and the calm of many a summer
evening was rent asunder by their squeals. There were an enormous number
of little pigs, for in that part of the country it was unfortunately not
the custom to eat sucking-pigs, which is such a convenient as well as
agreeable way of keeping them quiet, and they squealed atrociously; out
of sheer high spirits, I suppose, being pampered pigs and having no
earthly reason to squeal except for joy.

Remembering all this, I determined that up here at any rate we should be
pure from pigs. And from cows too; and from chickens. For did I not also
remember things both cows and chickens had done to me? The hopes of a
whole year in the garden had often been destroyed by one absent-minded,
wandering cow; and though we did miracles with wire-netting and the
concealing of wire-netting by creepers, sooner or later a crowd of
lustful hens, led by some great bully of a cock, got in and tore up the
crocuses just at that early time of the year when, after an endless
winter, crocuses seem the most precious and important things in the
world.

Therefore this place had been kept carefully empty of live-stock, and we
bought our eggs and our milk from the peasants, and didn't have any
sausages, and the iris bulbs were not scratched up, and the air had
nothing in it but smells of honey and hay in summer, and nothing in
winter but the ineffable pure cold smell of what, again for want of a
better word, I can only describe as God. But then the war came, and our
hurried return to England; and instead of being back as we had thought
for Christmas, we didn't come back at all. Year after year went,
Christmas after Christmas, and nobody came back. I suppose Antoine began
at last to feel as if nobody ever would come back. I can't guess at what
moment precisely in those years his thoughts began to put out feelers
towards pigs, but he did at last consider it proper to regard my pre-war
instructions as finally out of date, and gathered a suitable selection
of live-stock about him. I expect he got to this stage fairly early, for
having acquired a nice, round little wife he was determined, being a
wise man, to keep her so. And having also an absentee _patrone_--that is
the word that locally means me--absent, and therefore not able to be
disturbed by live-stock, he would keep her placid by keeping her
unconscious.

How simple, and how intelligent.

In none of his monthly letters did the word pig, cow, or chicken appear.
He wrote agreeably of the weather: _c'était magnifique,_ or _c'était
bien triste_, according to the season. He wrote of the French and
Belgian sick prisoners of war, interned in those places scattered about
the mountains which used to be the haunts of parties catered for by
Lunn. He wrote appreciatively of the usefulness and good conduct of the
watch-dog, a splendid creature, much bigger than I am, with the
lap-doggy name of Mou-Mou. He lengthily described unexciting objects
like the whiskers of the cat: _favoris superbes qui poussent toujours,
malgré ces jours maigres de guerre_; and though sometimes he expressed a
little disappointment at the behaviour of Mrs. Antoine's _estomac, qui
lui fait beaucoup d'ennuis et paraît mal résister aux grands froids_, he
always ended up soothingly: _Pour la maison tout va bien. Madame peut
être entièrement tranquille._

Never a word, you see, about the live-stock.

So there in England was Madame being _entièrement tranquille_ about her
little house, and glad indeed that she could be; for whatever had
happened to it or to the Antoines she wouldn't have been able to do
anything. Tethered on the other side of the impassable barrier of war,
if the house had caught fire she could only, over there in England, have
wrung her hands; and if Mrs. Antoine's _estomac_ had given out so
completely that she and Antoine had had to abandon their post and take
to the plains and doctors, she could only have sat still and cried. The
soothing letters were her comfort for five years,--_madame peût-être
entièrement tranquille_; how sweetly the words fell, month by month, on
ears otherwise harassed and tormented!

It wasn't till I had been here nearly a fortnight that I began to be
aware of my breakfast. Surely it was very nice? Such a lot of milk; and
every day a little jug of cream. And surprising butter,--surprising not
only because it was so very fresh but because it was there at all. I had
been told in England that there was no butter to be got here, not an
ounce to be bought from one end of Switzerland to the other. Well, there
it was; fresh every day, and in a singular abundance.

Through the somnolence of my mind, of all the outward objects
surrounding me I think it was the butter that got in first; and my
awakening intelligence, after a period of slow feeling about and some
relapses, did at last one morning hit on the conviction that at the
other end of that butter was a cow.

This, so far, was to be expected as the result of reasoning. But where I
began to be pleased with myself, and feel as if Paley's Evidences had
married Sherlock Holmes and I was the bright pledge of their loves, was
when I proceeded from this, without moving from my chair, to discover
by sheer thinking that the cow was very near the butter, because else
the butter couldn't possibly be made fresh every day,--so near that it
must be at that moment grazing on the bit of pasture belonging to me;
and, if that were so, the conclusion was irresistible that it must be my
cow.

After that my thoughts leaped about the breakfast table with comparative
nimbleness. I remembered that each morning there had been an egg, and
that eggy puddings had appeared at the other meals. Before the war it
was almost impossible to get eggs up here; clearly, then, I had chickens
of my own. And the honey; I felt it would no longer surprise me to
discover that I also had bees, for this honey was the real thing,--not
your made-up stuff of the London shops. And strawberries; every morning
a great cabbage leaf of strawberries had been on the table, real garden
strawberries, over long ago down in the valley and never dreamed of as
things worth growing by the peasants in the mountains. Obviously I
counted these too among my possessions in some corner out of sight. The
one object I couldn't proceed to by inductive reasoning from what was on
the table was a pig. Antoine's courage had failed him over that. Too
definitely must my repeated warning have echoed in his ears: _Surtout
pas de porcs._

But how very intelligent he had been. It needs intelligence if one is
conscientious to disobey orders at the right moment. And me so unaware
all the time, and therefore so unworried!

He passed along the terrace at that moment, a watering-pot in his hand.

'Antoine,' I said.

'Madame,' he said, stopping and taking off his cap.

'This egg--' I said, pointing to the shell. I said it in French, but
prefer not to put my French on paper.

'_Ah--madame a vu les poules_.'

'This butter--'

'_Ah--madame a visité la vache._'

'The pig--?' I hesitated. 'Is there--is there also a pig?'

'_Si madame veut descendre à la cave--_'

'You never keep a pig in the cellar?' I exclaimed.

'_Comme jambon,_' said Antoine--calm, perfect of manner, without a trace
of emotion.

And there sure enough I was presently proudly shown by Mrs. Antoine,
whose feelings are less invisible than her husband's, hanging from the
cellar ceiling on hooks that which had once been pig. Several pigs;
though she talked as if there had never been more than one. It may be
so, of course, but if it is so it must have had a great many legs.

_Un porc centipède_, I remarked thoughtfully, gazing upwards at the
forest of hams.

Over the thin ice of this comment she slid, however, in a voluble
description of how, when the armistice was signed, she and Antoine had
instantly fallen upon and slain the pig--pig still in the
singular--expecting Madame's arrival after that felicitous event at any
minute, and comprehending that _un porc vivant pourrait déranger madame,
mais que mort il ne fait rien à personne que du plaisir._ And she too
gazed upwards, but with affection and pride.

There remained then nothing to do but round off these various
transactions by a graceful and grateful paying for them. Which I did
to-day, Antoine presenting the bills, accompanied by complicated
calculations and deductions of the market price of the milk and butter
and eggs he and Mrs. Antoine would otherwise have consumed during the
past years.

I didn't look too closely into what the pig had cost,--his price, as my
eye skimmed over it was obviously the price of something plural. But my
eye only skimmed. It didn't dwell. Always Antoine and I have behaved to
each other like gentlemen.


_August 12th._

I wonder why I write all this. Is it because it is so like talking to a
friend at the end of the day, and telling him, who is interested and
loves to hear, everything one has done? I suppose it is that; and that I
want, besides, to pin down these queer days as they pass,--days so
utterly unlike any I ever had before. I want to hold them a minute in my
hand and look at them, before letting them drop away for ever. Then,
perhaps, in lots of years, when I have half forgotten what brought me up
here, and don't mind a bit about anything except to laugh--to laugh with
the tenderness of a wise old thing at the misunderstandings, and
mistakes, and failures that brought me so near shipwreck, and yet
underneath were still somehow packed with love--I'll open this and read
it, and I daresay quote that Psalm about going through the vale of
misery and using it as a well, and be quite pleasantly entertained.


_August 13th._

If one sets one's face westwards and goes on and on along the side of
the mountain, refusing either to climb higher or go lower, and having
therefore to take things as they come and somehow get through--roaring
torrents, sudden ravines, huge trees blown down in a forgotten blizzard
and lying right across one's way; all the things that mountains have up
their sleeve waiting for one--one comes, after two hours of walk so
varied as to include scowling rocks and gloomy forests, bright stretches
of delicious grass full of flowers, bits of hayfield, clusters of
fruit-trees, wide sun-flooded spaces with nothing between one apparently
and the great snowy mountains, narrow paths where it is hardly light
enough to see, smells of resin and hot fir needles, smells of
traveller's joy, smells of just cut grass, smells of just sawn wood,
smells of water tumbling over stones, muddy smells where the peasants
have turned some of the torrent away through shallow channels into their
fields, honey smells, hot smells, cold smells,--after two hours of this
walking, which would be tiring because of the constant difficulty of the
ground if it weren't for the odd way the air has here of carrying you,
of making you feel as though you were being lifted along, one comes at
last to the edge of a steep slope where there is a little group of
larches.

Then one sits down.

These larches are at the very end of a long tongue into which the
mountain one started on has somehow separated, and it is under them that
one eats one's dinner of hard boiled egg and bread and butter, and sits
staring, while one does so, in much astonishment at the view. For it is
an incredibly beautiful view from here, of an entirely different range
of mountains from the one seen from my terrace; and the valley, with its
twisting, tiny silver thread that I know is a great rushing river, has
strange, abrupt, isolated hills scattered over it that appear each to
have a light and colour of its own, with no relation to the light and
colour of the mountains.

When first I happened on this place the building of my house had already
been started, and it was too late to run to the architect and say: Here
and here only will I live. But I did for a wild moment, so great was the
beauty I had found, hope that perhaps Swiss houses might be like those
Norwegian ones one reads about that take to pieces and can be put up
again somewhere else when you've got bored, and I remember scrambling
back hastily in heat and excitement to ask him whether this were so.

He said it wasn't; and seemed even a little ruffled, if so calm a man
were capable of ruffling, that I should suppose he would build anything
that could come undone.

'This house,' he said, pointing at the hopeless-looking mass that
ultimately became so adorable, 'is built for posterity. It is on a rock,
and will partake of the same immovability.'

And when I told him of the place I had found, the exquisite place, more
beautiful than a dream and a hundred times more beautiful than the place
we had started building on, he, being a native of the district, hardy on
his legs on Sundays and accordingly acquainted with every inch of ground
within twenty miles, told me that it was so remote from villages, so
inaccessible by any road, that it was suited as a habitation only to
goats.

'Only goats,' he said with finality, waving his hand, 'could dwell
there, and for goats I do not build.'

So that my excitement cooled down before the inevitable, and I have
lived to be very glad the house is where it is and not where, for a few
wild hours, I wanted it; for now I can go to the other when I am in a
beauty mood and see it every time with fresh wonder, while if I lived
there I would have got used to it long ago, and my ardour been, like
other ardours, turned by possession into complacency. Or, to put it a
little differently, the house here is like an amiable wife to whom it is
comfortable to come back for meals and sleeping purposes, and the other
is a secret love, to be visited only on the crest of an ecstasy.

To-day I took a hard boiled egg and some bread and butter, and visited
my secret love.

The hard boiled egg doesn't seem much like an ecstasy, but it is a very
good foundation for one. There is great virtue in a hard boiled egg. It
holds one down, yet not too heavily. It satisfies without inflaming.
Sometimes, after days of living on fruit and bread, a slice of underdone
meat put in a sandwich and eaten before I knew what I was doing, has
gone straight to my head in exactly the way wine would, and I have seen
the mountains double and treble themselves, besides not keeping still,
in a very surprising and distressing way, utterly ruinous to raptures.
So now I distrust sandwiches and will not take them; and all that goes
with me is the hard boiled egg. Oh, and apricots, when I can get them.
I forgot the apricots. I took a handful to-day,--big, beautiful
rosy-golden ones, grown in the hot villages of the valley, a very
apricotty place. And, that every part of me should have sustenance, I
also took Law's _Serious Call_.

He went because he's the thinnest book I've got on my shelves that has
at the same time been praised by Dr. Johnson. I've got several others
that Dr. Johnson has praised, such as Ogden on _Prayer_, but their bulk,
even if their insides were attractive, makes them have to stay at home.
Johnson, I remembered, as I weighed Law thoughtfully in my hand and felt
how thin he was, said of the _Serious Call_ that he took it up expecting
it to be a dull book, and perhaps to laugh at it--'but I found Law quite
an overmatch for me.' He certainly would be an overmatch for me, I knew,
should I try to stand up to him, but that was not my intention. What I
wanted was a slender book that yet would have enough entertainment in it
to nourish me all day; and opening the _Serious Call_ I was caught at
once by the story of Octavius, a learned and ingenious man who, feeling
that he wasn't going to live much longer, told the friends hanging on
his lips attentive to the wisdom that would, they were sure, drop out,
that in the decay of nature in which he found himself he had left off
all taverns and was now going to be nice in what he drank, so that he
was resolved to furnish his cellar with a little of the very best
whatever it might cost. And hardly had he delivered himself of this
declaration than 'he fell ill, was committed to a nurse, and had his
eyes closed by her before his fresh parcel of wine came in.'

The effect of this on some one called Eugenius was to send him home a
new man, full of resolutions to devote himself wholly to God; for 'I
never, says Eugenius, was so deeply affected with the wisdom and
importance of religion as when I saw how poorly and meanly the learned
Octavius was to leave the world through the want of it.'

So Law went with me, and his vivacious pages,--the story of Octavius is
but one of many; there is Matilda and her unhappy daughters ('The eldest
daughter lived as long as she could under this discipline,' but found
she couldn't after her twentieth year and died, 'her entrails much hurt
by being crushed together with her stays';) Eusebia and her happy
daughters, who were so beautifully brought up that they had the
satisfaction of dying virgins; Lepidus, struck down as he was dressing
himself for a feast; the admirable Miranda, whose meals were carefully
kept down to exactly enough to give her proper strength to lift eyes and
hands to heaven, so that 'Miranda will never have her eyes swell with
fatness or pant under a heavy load of flesh until she has changed her
religion'; Mundamus, who if he saw a book of devotion passed it by;
Classicus, who openly and shamelessly preferred learning to
devotion--these vivacious pages greatly enlivened and adorned my day.
But I did feel, as I came home at the end of it, that Dr. Johnson, for
whom no one has more love and less respect than I, ought to have spent
some at least of his earlier years, when he was still accessible to
reason, with, say, Voltaire.

Now I am going to bed, footsore but glad, for this picnic to-day was a
test. I wanted to see how far on I have got in facing memories. When I
set out I pretended to myself that I was going from sheer
considerateness for servants, because I wished Mrs. Antoine to have a
holiday from cooking my dinner, but I knew in my heart that I was
making, in trepidation and secret doubt, a test. For the way to this
place of larches bristles with happy memories. They would be sitting
waiting for me, I knew, at every bush and corner in radiant rows. If
only they wouldn't be radiant, I thought, I wouldn't mind. The way, I
thought, would have been easier if it had been punctuated with
remembered quarrels. Only then I wouldn't have gone to it at all, for my
spirit shudders away from places where there has been unkindness. It is
the happy record of this little house that never yet have its walls
heard an unkind word or a rude word, and not once has anybody cried in
it. All the houses I have lived in, except this, had their sorrows, and
one at least had worse things than sorrows; but this one, my little
house of peace hung up in the sunshine well on the way to heaven, is
completely free from stains, nothing has ever lived in it that wasn't
kind. And I shall not count the wretchedness I dragged up with me three
weeks ago as a break in this record, as a smudge on its serenity, but
only as a shadow passing across the sun. Because, however beaten down I
was and miserable, I brought no anger with me and no resentment.
Unkindness has still not come into the house.

Now I am going very happy to bed, for I have passed the test. The whole
of the walk to the larches, and the whole of the way back, and all the
time I was sitting there, what I felt was simply gratitude, gratitude
for the beautiful past times I have had. I found I couldn't help it. It
was as natural as breathing. I wasn't lonely. Everybody I have loved and
shall never see again was with me. And all day, the whole of the
wonderful day of beauty, I was able in that bright companionship to
forget the immediate grief, the aching wretchedness, that brought me up
here to my mountains as a last hope.


_August 14th._

To-day it is my birthday, so I thought I would expiate it by doing some
useful work.

It is the first birthday I've ever been alone, with nobody to say Bless
you. I like being blessed on my birthday, seen off into my new year with
encouragement and smiles. Perhaps, I thought, while I dressed, Antoine
would remember. After all, I used to have birthdays when I was here
before, and he must have noticed the ripple of excitement that lay along
the day, how it was wreathed in flowers from breakfast-time on and
dotted thick with presents. Perhaps he would remember, and wish me luck.
Perhaps if he remembered he would tell his wife, and she would wish me
luck too. I did very much long to-day to be wished luck.

But Antoine, if he had ever known, had obviously forgotten. He was doing
something to the irises when I came down, and though I went out and
lingered round him before beginning breakfast he took no notice; he just
went on with the irises. So I daresay I looked a little wry, for I did
feel rather afraid I might be going to be lonely.

This, then, I thought, giving myself a hitch of determination, was the
moment for manual labour. As I drank my coffee I decided to celebrate
the day by giving both the Antoines a holiday and doing the work myself.
Why shouldn't my birthday be celebrated by somebody else having a good
time? What did it after all matter who had the good time so long as
somebody did? The Antoines should have a holiday, and I would work. So
would I defend my thoughts from memories that might bite. So would I, by
the easy path of perspiration, find peace.

Antoine, however, didn't seem to want a holiday. I had difficulty with
him. He wasn't of course surprised when I told him he had got one,
because he never is, but he said, with that level intonation that gives
his conversation so noticeable a calm, that it was the day for cutting
the lawn.

I said I would cut the lawn; I knew about lawns; I had been brought up
entirely on lawns,--I believe I told him I had been born on one, in my
eagerness to forestall his objections and get him to go.

He said that such work would be too hot for Madame in the sort of
weather we were having; and I said that no work on an object so
small as our lawn could be too hot. Besides, I liked being hot, I
explained--again with eagerness--I wanted to be hot, I was happy when I
was hot. '_J'aime beaucoup,_ I said, not stopping in my hurry to pick my
words, and anyhow imperfect in French, '_la sueur_.'

I believe I ought to have said _la transpiration,_ the other word being
held in slight if any esteem as a word for ladies, but I still more
believe that I oughtn't to have said anything about it at all. I don't
know, of course, because of Antoine's immobility of expression; but in
spite of this not varying at what I had said by the least shadow of a
flicker I yet somehow felt, it was yet somehow conveyed to me, that
perhaps in French one doesn't perspire, or if one does one doesn't talk
about it. Not if one is a lady. Not if one is Madame. Not, to ascend
still further the scale of my self-respect enforcing attributes, if one
is that dignified object the _patrone_.

I find it difficult to be dignified. When I try, I overdo it. Always my
dignity is either over or under done, but its chief condition is that of
being under done. Antoine, however, very kindly helps me up to the
position he has decided I ought to fill, by his own unalterable calm. I
have never seen him smile. I don't believe he could without cracking, of
so unruffled a glassiness is his countenance.

Once, before the war--everything I have done that has been cheerful and
undesirable was before the war; I've been nothing but exemplary and
wretched since--I was undignified. We dressed up; and on the advice of
my friends--I now see that it was bad advice--I allowed myself to be
dressed as a devil; I, the _patrone_; I, Madame. It was true I was only
a little devil, quite one of the minor ones, what the Germans would call
a _Hausteufelchen_; but a devil I was. And going upstairs again
unexpectedly, to fetch my tail which had been forgotten, I saw at the
very end of the long passage, down which I had to go, Antoine collecting
the day's boots.

He stood aside and waited. I couldn't go back, because that would have
looked as though I were doing something I knew I oughtn't to. Therefore
I proceeded.

The passage was long and well lit. Down the whole of it I had to go,
while Antoine at the end stood and waited. I tried to advance with
dignity. I tried to hope he wouldn't recognise me. I tried to feel sure
he wouldn't. How could he? I was quite black, except for a wig that
looked like orange-coloured flames. But when I got to the doors at the
end it was the one to my bedroom that Antoine threw open, and past him I
had to march while he stood gravely aside. And strangely enough, what I
remember feeling most acutely was a quite particular humiliation and
shame that I hadn't got my tail on.

'_C'est que j'ai oublié ma queue_....' I found myself stammering, with a
look of agonised deprecation and apology at him.

And even then Antoine wasn't surprised.

Well, where was I? Oh yes--at the _transpiration_. Antoine let it pass
over him, as I have said, without a ruffle, and drew my attention to the
chickens who would have to be fed and the cow who would have to be
milked. Perhaps the cow might be milked on his return, but the
chickens--

Antoine was softening.

I said quickly that all he had to do would be to put the chickens' food
ready and I would administer it, and as for the cow, why not let her
have a rest for once, why not let her for once not he robbed of what was
after all her own?

And to cut the conversation short, and determined that my birthday
should not pass without somebody getting a present, I ran upstairs and
fetched down a twenty-franc note and pressed it into Antoine's hand and
said breathlessly in a long and voluble sentence that began with
_Voilà_, but didn't keep it up at that level, that the twenty francs
were for his expenses for himself and Mrs. Antoine down in the valley,
and that I hoped they would enjoy themselves, and would he remember me
very kindly to his _maman_, to whom he would no doubt pay a little visit
during the course of what I trusted would be a long, crowded, and
agreeable day.

They went off ultimately, but with reluctance. Completely undignified, I
stood on the low wall of the terrace and waved to them as they turned
the corner at the bottom of the path.

'_Mille félicitations_!' I cried, anxious that somebody should be wished
happiness on my birthday.

'If I _am_ going to have a lonely birthday it shall be _thoroughly_
lonely,' I said grimly to myself as, urged entirely by my volition, the
Antoines disappeared and left me to the solitary house.

I decided to begin my day's work by making my bed, and went upstairs
full of resolution.

Mrs. Antoine, however, had done that; no doubt while I was arguing with
Antoine.

The next thing, then, I reflected, was to tidy away breakfast, so I came
downstairs again, full of more resolution.

Mrs. Antoine, however, had done that too; no doubt while I was still
arguing with Antoine.

Well then, oughtn't I to begin to do something with potatoes? With a
view to the dinner-hour? Put them on, or something? I was sure the
putting on of potatoes would make me perspire. I longed to start my
_transpiration_ in case by any chance, if I stayed too long inactive and
cool, I should notice how very silent and empty....

I hurried into the kitchen, a dear little place of white tiles and
copper saucepans, and found pots simmering gently on the stove: potatoes
in one, and in the other bits of something that well might be chicken.
Also, on a tray was the rest of everything needed for my dinner. All I
would have to do would be to eat it.

Baulked, but still full of resolution, I set out in search of the
lawn-mower. It couldn't be far away, because nothing is able to be
anything but close on my narrow ledge of rock.

Mou-Mou, sitting on his haunches in the shade at the back of the house,
watched me with interest as I tried to open the sorts of outside doors
that looked as if they shut in lawn-mowers.

They were all locked.

The magnificent Mou-Mou, who manages to imitate Antoine's trick of not
being surprised, though he hasn't yet quite caught his air of absence of
curiosity, got up after the first door and lounged after me as I tried
the others. He could do this because, though tied up, Antoine has
ingeniously provided for his exercise, and at the same time for the
circumvention of burglars, by fixing an iron bar the whole length of the
wall behind the house and fastening Mou-Mou's chain to it by a loose
ring. So that he can run along it whenever he feels inclined; and a
burglar, having noted the kennel at the east end of this wall and
Mou-Mou sitting chained up in front of it, would find, on preparing to
attack the house at its west and apparently dogless end, that the dog
was nevertheless there before him. A rattle and a slide, and there would
be Mou-Mou. Very _morale_-shaking. Very freezing in its unexpectedness
to the burglar's blood, and paralysing to his will to sin. Thus Antoine,
thinking of everything, had calculated. There hasn't ever been a
burglar, but, as he said of his possible suppurating wounds, '_Il ne
faut pas attendre qu'on les a pour se procurer le remède._'

Mou-Mou accordingly came with me as I went up and down the back of the
house trying the range of outside doors. I think he thought at last it
was a game, for as each door wouldn't open and I paused a moment
thwarted, he gave a loud double bark, as one who should in the Psalms,
after each verse, say _Selah_.

Antoine had locked up the lawn-mower. The mowing was to be put off till
to-morrow rather than that Madame in the heat should mow. I appreciated
the kindness of his intentions, but for all that was much vexed by being
baulked. On my birthday too. Baulked of the one thing I really wanted,
_la transpiration_. It didn't seem much to ask on my birthday, I who
used, without so much as lifting a finger, to acquire on such occasions
quite other beads.

Undecided, I stood looking round the tidy yard for something I could be
active over, and Mou-Mou sat upright on his huge haunches watching me.
He is so big that in this position our heads are on a level. He took
advantage of this by presently raising his tongue--it was already out,
hanging in the heat--as I still didn't move or say anything, and giving
my face an enormous lick. So then I went away, for I didn't like that.
Besides, I had thought of something.

In the flower-border along the terrace would be weeds. Flower-borders
always have weeds, and weeding is arduous. Also, all one wants for
weeding are one's own ten fingers, and Antoine couldn't prevent my using
those. So that was what I would do--bend down and tear up weeds, and in
this way forget the extraordinary sunlit, gaping, empty little house....

So great, however, had been the unflagging diligence of Antoine, and
also perhaps so poor and barren the soil, that after half an hour's
search I had only found three weeds, and even those I couldn't be sure
about, and didn't know for certain but what I might be pulling up some
precious bit of alpine flora put in on purpose and cherished by
Antoine. All I really knew was that what I tore up wasn't irises, and
wasn't delphiniums, and wasn't pansies; so that, I argued, it must be
weeds. Anyhow, I pulled three alien objects out, and laid them in a neat
row to show Antoine. Then I sat down and rested.

The search for them had made me hot, but that of course wouldn't last.
It was ages before I need go and feed the chickens. I sat on the terrace
wall wondering what I could do next. It was a pity that the Antoines
were so admirable. One could overdo virtue. A little less zeal, the
least judicious neglect on their part, and I would have found something
useful to do.

The place was quite extraordinarily silent. There wasn't a sound. Even
Mou-Mou round at the back, languid in the heat, didn't move. The immense
light beat on the varnished wooden face of the house and on the shut
shutters of all the unused rooms. Those rooms have been shut like that
for five years. The shutters are blistered with the fierce sun of five
summers, and the no less fierce sun of five winters. Their colour, once
a lively, swaggering blue, has faded to a dull grey: I sat staring up at
them. Suppose they were suddenly to be opened from inside, and faces
that used to live in them looked out?

A faint shudder trickled along my spine.

Well, but wouldn't I be glad really? Wouldn't they be the dearest
ghosts? That room at the end, for instance, so tightly shut up now, that
was where my brother used to sleep when he came out for his holidays.
Wouldn't I love to see him look out at me? How gaily he used to
arrive,--in such spirits because he had got rid of work for a bit, and
for a series of divine weeks was going to stretch himself in the sun!
The first thing he always did when he got up to his room was to hurry
out on to its little balcony to see if the heavenly view of the valley
towards the east with the chain of snow mountains across the end were
still as heavenly as he remembered it; and I could see him with his head
thrown back, breathing deep breaths of the lovely air, adoring it,
radiant with delight to have got back to it, calling down to me to come
quick and look, for it could never have been so beautiful as at that
moment and could never possibly be so beautiful again.

I loved him very much. I don't believe anybody ever had so dear a
brother. He was so quick to appreciate and understand, so slow to
anger, so clear of brain and gentle of heart. Of course he was killed.
Such people always are, if there is any killing going on anywhere. He
volunteered at the very beginning of the war, and though his fragility
saved him for a long time he was at last swept in. That was in March
1918. He was killed the first week. I loved him very much, and he loved
me. He called me sweet names, and forgave me all my trespasses.

And in the next room to that--oh well, I'm not going to dig out every
ghost. I can't really write about some of them, the pain hurts too much.
I've not been into any of the shut rooms since I came back. I couldn't
bear it. Here out of doors I can take a larger view, not mind going to
the places of memories; but I know those rooms will have been kept as
carefully unchanged by Antoine as I found mine. I daren't even think of
them. I had to get up off the wall and come away from staring up at
those shutters, for suddenly I found myself right on the very edge of
the dreadful pit I'm always so afraid of tumbling into--the great,
black, cold, empty pit of horror, of realisation....

That's why I've been writing all this, just so as not to think....


_Bedtime._

I must put down what happened after that. I ought to be in bed, but I
must put down how my birthday ended.

Well, there I was sitting, trying by writing to defend myself against
the creeping fear of the silence round me and the awareness of those
shut rooms up stairs, when Mou-Mou barked. He barked suddenly and
furiously; and the long screech of his chain showed that he was rushing
along the wall to the other side of the house.

Instantly my thoughts became wholesome. I jumped up. Here was the
burglar at last. I flew round to greet him. Anything was better than
those shutters, and that hot, sunlit silence.

Between my departure from the terrace and my arrival at the other side
of the house I had had time, so quickly did my restored mind work, to
settle that whoever it was, burglar or not, I was going to make friends.
If it really were a burglar I would adopt the line the bishop took
towards Jean Valjean, and save him from the sin of theft by making him a
present of everything he wished to take,--conduct which perhaps might
save me as well, supposing he was the kind of burglar who would want to
strangle opposition. Also, burglar or no burglar, I would ask him to
dinner; compel him, in fact, to come in and share my birthday chicken.

What I saw when I got round, standing just out of reach of the leaping
Mou-Mou on the top of the avalanche wall, looking down at him with
patience rather than timidity, holding their black skirts back in case
an extra leap of his should reach them, were two women. Strangers, not
natives. Perhaps widows. But anyhow people who had been bereaved.

I immediately begged them to come in. The relief and refreshment of
seeing them! Two human beings of obvious respectability, warm flesh and
blood persons, not burglars, not ghosts, not even of the sex one
associates with depredation,--just decent, alive women, complete in
every detail, even to each carrying an umbrella. They might have been
standing on the curb in Oxford Street waiting to hail an omnibus, so
complete were they, so prepared in their clothes to face the world.
Button boots, umbrella,--I hadn't seen an umbrella since I got here.
What you usually take for a walk on the mountains is a stout stick with
an iron point to it; but after all, why shouldn't you take an umbrella?
Then if it rains you can put it up, and if the sun is unbearable you
can put it up too, and it too has a metal tip to it which you can dig
into the ground if you begin to slide down precipices.

'_Bon jour_,' I said eagerly, looking up at these black silhouettes
against the sky. '_Je vous prie de venir me voir._'

They stared at me, still holding back their skirts from the leaping dog.

Perhaps they were Italians. I am close to Italy, and Italian women
usually dress in black.

I know some Italian words, and I know the one you say when you want
somebody to come in, so I tried that.

'_Avanti_,' I said breathlessly.

They didn't. They still just stood and stared.

They couldn't be English I thought, because underneath their black
skirts I could see white cotton petticoats with embroidery on them, the
kind that England has shed these fifty years, and that is only now to be
found in remote and religious parts of abroad, like the more fervent
portions of Lutheran Germany. Could they be Germans? The thought
distracted me. How could I ask two Germans in? How could I sit at meat
with people whose male relations had so recently been killing mine? Or
been killed by them, perhaps, judging from their black clothes. Anyhow
there was blood between us. But how could I resist asking them in, when
if I didn't there would be hours and hours of intolerable silence and
solitude for me, till evening brought those Antoines back who never
ought to have been let go? On my birthday, too.

I know some German words--it is wonderful what a lot of languages I seem
to know some words in--so I threw one up at them between two of
Mou-Mou's barks.

'_Deutsch_?' I inquired.

They ignored it.

'That's all my languages,' I then said in despair.

The only thing left that I might still try on them was to talk on my
fingers, which I can a little; but if they didn't happen, I reflected,
to be deaf and dumb perhaps they wouldn't like that. So I just looked up
at them despairingly, and spread out my hands and drew my shoulders to
my ears as Mrs. Antoine does when she is conveying to me that the butter
has come to an end.

Whereupon the elder of the two--neither was young, but one was less
young--the elder of the two informed me in calm English that they had
lost their way, and she asked me to direct them and also to tell the
dog not to make quite so much noise, in order that they might clearly
understand what I said. 'He is a fine fellow,' she said, 'but we should
be glad if he would make less noise.'

The younger one said nothing, but smiled at me. She was
pleasant-looking, this one, flushed and nicely moist from walking in the
heat. The other one was more rocky; considering the weather, and the
angle of the slope they had either come up or down, she seemed quite
unnaturally arid.

I seized Mou-Mou by the collar, and ran him along to his kennel.

'You stay there and be good,' I said to him, though I know he doesn't
understand a word of English. 'He won't hurt you,' I assured the
strangers, going back to them.

'Ah,' said the elder of the two; and added, 'I used to say that to
people about _my_ dog.'

They still stood motionless, holding their skirts, the younger one
smiling at me.

'Won't you come down?' I said. 'Come in and rest a little? I can tell
you better about your road if you'll come in. Look--you go along that
path there, and it brings you round to the front door.'

'Will the dog be at the front door?' asked the elder.

'Oh no--besides, he wouldn't hurt a fly.'

'Ah,' said the elder eyeing Mou-Mou sideways, who, from his kennel, eyed
her, 'I used to say that to people about _my_ dog.'

The younger one stood smiling at me. They neither of them moved.

'I'll come up and bring you down,' I said, hurrying round to the path
that leads from the terrace on to the slope.

When they saw that this path did indeed take them away from Mou-Mou they
came with me.

Directly they moved he made a rush along his bar, but arrived too late
and could only leap up and down barking.

'That's just high spirits,' I said. 'He is really most goodnatured and
affectionate.'

'Ah,' said the elder, 'I used to say that to people--'

'Mind those loose stones,' I interrupted; and I helped each one down the
last crumbly bit on to the terrace.

They both had black kid gloves on. More than ever, as I felt these warm
gloves press my hand, was I sure that what they really wanted was an
omnibus along Oxford Street.

Once on the level and out of sight of Mou-Mou, they walked with an air
of self-respect. Especially the elder. The younger, though she had it
too, seemed rather to be following an example than originating an
attitude. Perhaps they were related to a Lord Mayor, I thought. Or a
rector. But a Lord Mayor would be more likely to be the cause of that
air of glowing private background to life.

They had been up the mountain, the elder told me, trying to find
somewhere cool to stay in, for the valley this weather was unendurable.
They used to know this district years ago, and recollected a pension
right up in the highest village, and after great exertions and rising
early that morning they had reached it only to find that it had become a
resort for consumptives. With no provision for the needs of the passing
tourist; with no desire, in fact, in any way to minister to them. If it
hadn't been for me, she said, as they sat on the cool side of the house
drinking lemonade and eating biscuits, if it hadn't been for me and what
she described with obvious gratitude--she couldn't guess my joy at
seeing them both!--as my kindness, they would have had somehow to
clamber down foodless by wrong roads, seeing that they had lost the
right one, to the valley again, and in what state they would have
re-entered that scorching and terrible place she didn't like to think.
Tired as they were. Disappointed, and distressingly hot. How very
pleasant it was up here. What a truly delightful spot. Such air. Such a
view. And how agreeable and unexpected to come across one of one's own
country-women.

To all this the younger in silence smiled agreement.

They had been so long abroad, continued the elder, that they felt
greatly fatigued by foreigners, who were so very prevalent. In their
pension there were nothing but foreigners and flies. The house wasn't by
any chance--no, of course it couldn't be, but it wasn't by any
chance--her voice had a sudden note of hope in it--a pension?

I shook my head and laughed at that, and said it wasn't. The younger one
smiled at me.

Ah no--of course not, continued the elder, her voice fading again. And
she didn't suppose I could tell them of any pension anywhere about,
where they could get taken in while this great heat lasted? Really the
valley was most terribly airless. The best hotel, which had, she knew,
some cool rooms, was beyond their means, so they were staying in one of
the small ones, and the flies worried them. Apparently I had no flies
up here. And what wonderful air. At night, no doubt, it was quite cool.
The nights in the valley were most trying. It was difficult to sleep.

I asked them to stay to lunch. They accepted gratefully. When I took
them to my room to wash their hands they sighed with pleasure at its
shadiness and quiet. They thought the inside of the house delightfully
roomy, and more spacious, said the elder, while the younger one smiled
agreement, than one would have expected from its outside. I left them,
sunk with sighs of satisfaction, on the sofa in the hall, their black
toques and gloves on a chair beside them, gazing at the view through the
open front door while I went to see how the potatoes were getting on.

We lunched presently in the shade just outside the house, and the
strange ladies continued to be most grateful, the elder voicing their
gratitude, the younger smiling agreement. If it was possible to like one
more than the other, seeing with what enthusiasm I liked them both, I
liked the younger because she smiled. I love people who smile. It does
usually mean sweet pleasantness somewhere.

After lunch, while I cleared away, having refused their polite offers
of help,--for they now realised I was alone in the house, on which,
however, though it must have surprised them they made no comment,--they
went indoors to the sofa again, whose soft cushions seemed particularly
attractive to them; and when I came back the last time for the
breadcrumbs and tablecloth, I found they had both fallen asleep, the
elder one with her handkerchief over her face.

Poor things. How tired they were. How glad I was that they should be
resting and getting cool. A little sleep would do them both good.

I crept past them on tiptoe with my final armful, and was careful to
move about in the kitchen very quietly. It hadn't been my intention,
with guests to lunch, to wash up and put away, but rather to sit with
them and talk. Not having talked for so long it seemed a godsend, a
particularly welcome birthday present, suddenly to have two English
people drop in on me from the skies. Up to this moment I had been busy,
first getting lemonade to slake their thirst and then lunch to appease
their hunger, and the spare time in between these activities had been
filled with the expression of their gratitude by the elder and her
expatiations on the house and what she called the grounds; but I had
looked forward to about an hour's real talk after lunch, before they
would begin to want to start on their long downward journey to their
pension,--talk in which, without being specially brilliant any of us,
for you only had to look at us to see we wouldn't be specially that, we
yet might at least tell each other amusing things about, say, Lord
Mayors. It is true I don't know any Lord Mayors, though I do know
somebody whose brother married the daughter of one; but if they could
produce a Lord Mayor out of up their sleeve, as I suspected, I could
counter him with a dean. Not quite so showy, perhaps, but more
permanent. And I did want to talk. I have been silent so long that I
felt I could talk about almost anything.

Well, as they were having a little nap, poor things, I would tidy up the
kitchen meanwhile, and by the time that was done they would be refreshed
and ready for half an hour's agreeable interchange of gossip.

Every now and then during this tidying I peeped into the hall in case
they were awake, but they seemed if anything to be sounder asleep each
time. The younger one, her flushed face half buried, in a cushion, her
fair hair a little ruffled, had a pathetic look of almost infantile
helplessness; the elder, discreetly veiled by her handkerchief, slept
more stiffly, with less abandonment and more determination. Poor things.
How glad I was they should in this way gather strength for the long,
difficult scramble down the mountain; but also presently I began to wish
they would wake up.

I finished what I had to do in the kitchen, and came back into the hall.
They had been sleeping now nearly half an hour. I stood about
uncertainly. Poor things, they must be dreadfully tired to sleep like
that. I hardly liked to look at them, they were so defenceless, and I
picked up a book and tried to read; but I couldn't stop my eyes from
wandering over the top of it to the sofa every few minutes, and always I
saw the same picture of profound repose.

Presently I put down the book, and wandered out on to the terrace and
gazed awhile at the view. That, too, seemed wrapped in afternoon
slumber. After a bit I wandered round the house to Mou-Mou. He, too, was
asleep. Then I came back to the front door and glanced in at my guests.
Still no change. Then I fetched some cigarettes, not moving this time
quite so carefully, and going out again sat on the low terrace-wall at a
point from which I could see straight on to the sofa and notice any
movement that might take place.

I never smoke except when bored, and as I am never bored I never smoke.
But this afternoon it was just that unmanageable sort of moment come
upon me, that kind of situation I don't know how to deal with, which
does bore me. I sat on the wall and smoked three cigarettes, and the
peace on the sofa remained complete. What ought one to do? What did one
do, faced by obstinately sleeping guests? Impossible deliberately to
wake them up. Yet I was sure--they had now been asleep nearly an
hour--that when they did wake up, polite as they were, they would be
upset by discovering that they had slept. Besides, the afternoon was
getting on. They had a long way to go. If only Mou-Mou would wake up and
bark.... But there wasn't a sound. The hot afternoon brooded over the
mountains in breathless silence.

Again I went round to the back of the house, and pausing behind the last
corner so as to make what I did next more alarming, suddenly jumped out
at Mou Mou.

The horribly intelligent dog didn't bother to open more than an eye,
and that one he immediately shut again.

Disgusted with him, I returned to my seat on the wall and smoked another
cigarette. The picture on the sofa was the same: perfect peace. Oh well,
poor things--but I did want to talk. And after all it was my birthday.

When I had finished the cigarette I thought a moment, my face in my
hands. A person of tact--ah, but I have no tact; it has been my undoing
on the cardinal occasions of life that I have none. Well, but suppose I
_were_ a person of tact--what would I do? Instantly the answer flashed
into my brain: Knock, by accident, against a table.

So I did. I got up quickly and crossed into the hall and knocked against
a table, at first with gentleness, and then as there was no result with
greater vigour.

My elder guest behind the handkerchief continued to draw deep regular
breaths, but to my joy the younger one stirred and opened her eyes.

'Oh, I do _hope_ I didn't wake you?' I exclaimed, taking an eager step
towards the sofa.

She looked at me vaguely, and fell asleep again.

I went back on to the terrace and lit another cigarette. That was five.
I haven't smoked so much before in one day in my life ever. I felt quite
fast. And on my birthday too. By the time I had finished it there was a
look about the shadows on the grass that suggested tea. Even if it were
a little early the noise of the teacups might help to wake up my guests,
and I felt that a call to tea would be a delicate and hospitable way of
doing it.

I didn't go through the hall on tiptoe this time, but walked naturally;
and I opened the door into the kitchen rather noisily. Then I looked
round at the sofa to see the effect. There wasn't any.

Presently tea was ready, out on the table where we had lunched. At least
six times I had been backwards and forwards through the hall, the last
twice carrying things that rattled and that I encouraged to rattle. But
on the sofa the strangers slept peacefully on.

There was nothing for it now but to touch them. Short of that, I didn't
think that anything would wake them. But I don't like touching guests; I
mean, in between whiles. I have never done it. Especially not when they
weren't looking. And still more especially not when they were complete
strangers.

Therefore I approached the sofa with reluctance, and stood uncertain in
front of it. Poor things, they really were most completely asleep. It
seemed a pity to interrupt. Well, but they had had a nice rest; they had
slept soundly now for two hours. And the tea would be cold if I didn't
wake them up, and besides, how were they going to get home if they
didn't start soon? Still, I don't like touching guests. Especially
strange guests....

Manifestly, however, there was nothing else to be done, so I bent over
the younger one--the other one was too awe-inspiring with her
handkerchief over her face--and gingerly put my hand on her shoulder.

Nothing happened.

I put it on again, with a slightly increased emphasis.

She didn't open her eyes, but to my embarrassment laid her cheek on it
affectionately and murmured something that sounded astonishingly like
Siegfried.

I know about Siegfried, because of going to the opera. He was a German.
He still is, in the form of Siegfried Wagner, and I daresay of others;
and once somebody told me that when Germans wished to indulge their
disrespect for the Kaiser freely--he was not at that time yet an
ex-Kaiser---without being run in for _lèse majesté_, they loudly and
openly abused him under the name of Siegfried Meyer, whose initials,
S.M., also represent _Seine Majestät_; by which simple methods everybody
was able to be pleased and nobody was able to be hurt. So that when my
sleeping guest murmured Siegfried, I couldn't but conclude she was
dreaming of a German; and when at the same time she laid her cheek on my
hand, I was forced to realise that she was dreaming of him
affectionately. Which astonished me.

Imbued with patriotism--the accumulated patriotism of weeks spent out of
England--I felt that this English lady should instantly be roused from a
dream that did her no credit. She herself, I felt sure, would be the
first to deplore such a dream. So I drew my hand away from beneath her
cheek--even by mistake I didn't like it to be thought the hand of
somebody called Siegfried and, stooping down, said quite loud and
distinctly in her ear, 'Won't you come to tea?'

This, at last, did wake her. She sat up with a start, and looked at me
for a moment in surprise.

'Oh,' she said, confused, 'have I been asleep?'

'I'm very glad you have,' I said, smiling at her, for she was already
again smiling at me. 'Your climb this morning was enough to kill you.'

'Oh, but,' she murmured, getting up quickly and straightening her hair,
'how dreadful to come to your house and go to sleep--'

And she turned to the elder one, and again astonished me by, with one
swift movement, twitching the handkerchief off her face and saying
exactly as one says when playing the face-and-handkerchief game with
one's baby, 'Peep bo.' Then she turned back to me and smiled and said
nothing more, for I suppose she knew the elder one, roused thus
competently, would now do all the talking; as indeed she did, being as I
feared greatly upset and horrified when she found she had not only been
asleep but been it for two hours.

We had tea; and all the while, while the elder one talked of the trouble
she was afraid she had given, and the shame she felt that they should
have slept, and their gratitude for what she called my prolonged and
patient hospitality, I was wondering about the other. Whenever she
caught my pensive and inquiring eye she smiled at me. She had very
sweet eyes, grey ones, gentle and intelligent, and when she smiled an
agreeable dimple appeared. Bringing my Paley's _Evidences_ and Sherlock
Holmes' side to bear on her, I reasoned that my younger guest was, or
had been, a mother,--this because of the practised way she had twitched
the handkerchief off and said Peep bo; that she was either a widow, or
hadn't seen her husband for some time,--this because of the real
affection with which, in her sleep she had laid her cheek on my hand;
and that she liked music and often went to the opera.

After tea the elder got up stiffly--she had walked much too far already,
and was clearly unfit to go all that long way more--and said, if I would
direct them, they must now set out for the valley.

The younger one put on her toque obediently at this, and helped the
elder one to pin hers on straight. It was now five o'clock, and if they
didn't once lose their way they would be at their hotel by half-past
seven; in time, said the elder, for the end of _table-d'hôte,_ a meal
much interfered with by the very numerous flies. But if they did go
wrong at any point it would be much later, probably dark.

I asked them to stay.

To stay? The elder, engaged in buttoning her tight kid gloves, said it
was most kind of me, but they couldn't possibly stay any longer. It was
far too late already, owing to their so unfortunately having gone to
sleep--

'I mean stay the night,' I said; and explained that it would be doing me
a kindness, and because of that they must please overlook anything in
such an invitation that might appear unconventional, for certainly if
they did set out I should lie awake all night thinking of them lost
somewhere among the precipices, or perhaps fallen over one, and how much
better to go down comfortably in daylight, and I could lend them
everything they wanted, including a great many new toothbrushes I found
here,--in short, I not only invited, I pressed; growing more eager by
the sheer gathering momentum of my speech.

All day, while the elder talked and I listened, I had secretly felt
uneasy. Here was I, one woman in a house arranged for family gatherings,
while they for want of rooms were forced to swelter in the valley.
Gradually, as I listened, my uneasiness increased. Presently I began to
feel guilty. And at last, as I watched them sleeping in such exhaustion
on the sofa, I felt at the bottom of my heart somehow responsible. But
I don't know, of course, that it is wise to invite strangers to stay
with one.

They accepted gratefully. The moment the elder understood what it was
that my eager words were pressing on her, she drew the pins out of her
toque and laid it on the chair again; and so did the other one, smiling
at me.

When the Antoines came home I went out to meet them. By that time my
guests were shut up in their bedrooms with new toothbrushes. They had
gone up very early, both of them so stiff that they could hardly walk.
Till they did go up, what moments I had been able to spare from my hasty
preparations for their comfort had been filled entirely, as earlier in
the day, by the elder one's gratitude; there had still been no chance of
real talk.

'_J'ai des visites_,' I said to the Antoines, going out to meet them
when, through the silence of the evening, I heard their steps coming up
the path.

Antoine wasn't surprised. He just said, '_Ca sera comme autrefois_,' and
began to shut the shutters.

But I am. I can't go to bed, I'm so much surprised. I've been sitting
up here scribbling when I ought to have been in bed long ago. Who would
have thought that the day that began so emptily would end with two of my
rooms full,--each containing a widow? For they are widows, they told me:
widows who have lost their husbands by peaceful methods, nothing to do
with the war. Their names are Mrs. Barnes and Mrs. Jewks,--at least that
is what the younger one's sounded like; I don't know if I have spelt it
right. They come from Dulwich. I think the elder one had a slight
misgiving at the last, and seemed to remember what was due to the Lord
Mayor, when she found herself going to bed in a strange house belonging
to somebody of whom she knew nothing; for she remarked a little
doubtfully, and with rather a defensive eye fixed on me, that the war
had broken down many barriers, and that people did things now that they
wouldn't have dreamed of doing five years ago.

The other one didn't say nothing, but actually kissed me. I hope she
wasn't again mistaking me for Siegfried.


_August 15th_

My guests have gone again, but only to fetch their things and pay their
hotel bill, and then they are coming back to stay with me till it is a
little cooler. They are coming back to-morrow, not to-day. They are
entangled in some arrangement with their pension that makes it difficult
for them to leave at once.

Mrs. Barnes appeared at breakfast with any misgivings she may have had
last night gone, for when I suggested they should spend this hot weather
up here she immediately accepted. I hadn't slept for thinking of them.
How could I possibly not ask them to stay, seeing their discomfort and
my roominess? Towards morning it was finally clear to me that it wasn't
possible: I would ask them. Though, remembering the look in Mrs.
Barnes's eye the last thing last night, I couldn't be sure she would
accept. She might want to find out about me first, after the cautious
and hampering way of women,--oh, I wish women wouldn't always be so
cautious, but simply get on with their friendships! She might first want
assurances that there was some good reason for my being here all by
myself. Alas, there isn't a good reason; there is only a bad one. But,
fortunately, to be alone is generally regarded as respectable, in spite
of what Seneca says a philosopher said to a young man he saw walking by
himself: 'Have a care,' said he, 'of lewd company.'

However, I don't suppose Mrs. Barnes knew about Seneca. Anyhow she
didn't hesitate. She accepted at once, and said that under these
circumstances it was certainly due to me to tell me a little about
themselves.

At this I got my dean ready to meet the Lord Mayor, but after all I was
told nothing more than that my guests are sisters; for at this point,
very soon arrived at, the younger one, Mrs. Jewks, who had slipped away
on our getting up from breakfast, reappeared with the toques and gloves,
and said she thought they had better start before it got any hotter.

So they went, and the long day here has been most beautiful--so
peaceful, so quiet, with the delicate mountains like opals against the
afternoon sky, and the shadows lengthening along the valley.

I don't feel to-day as I did yesterday, that I want to talk. To-day I am
content with things exactly as they are: the sun, the silence, the
caresses of the funny little white kitten with the smudge of black round
its left eye that makes it look as though it must be somebody's wife,
and the pleasant knowledge that my new friends are coming back again.

I think that knowledge makes to-day more precious. It is the last day
for some time, for at least a week judging from the look of the blazing
sky, of what I see now that they are ending have been wonderful days. Up
the ladder of these days I have climbed slowly away from the blackness
at the bottom. It has been like finding some steps under water just as
one was drowning, and crawling up them to air and light. But now that I
have got at least most of myself back to air and light, and feel hopeful
of not slipping down again, it is surely time to arise, shake myself,
and begin to do something active and fruitful. And behold, just as I
realise this, just as I realise that I am, so to speak, ripe for
fruit-bearing, there appear on the scene Mrs. Barnes and Mrs. Jewks, as
it were the midwives of Providence.

Well, that shall be to-morrow. Meanwhile there is still to-day, and each
one of its quiet hours seems very precious. I wonder what my new friends
like to read. Suppose--I was going to say suppose it is _The Rosary_;
but I won't suppose that, for when it comes to supposing, why not
suppose something that isn't _The Rosary_? Why not, for instance,
suppose they like _Eminent Victorians_, and that we three are going to
sit of an evening delicately tickling each other with quotations from
it, and gently squirming in our seats for pleasure? It is just as easy
to suppose that as to suppose anything else, and as I'm not yet
acquainted with these ladies' tastes one supposition is as likely to be
right as another.

I don't know, though--I forgot their petticoats. I can't believe any
friends of Mr. Lytton Strachey wear that kind of petticoat, eminently
Victorian even though it be; and although he wouldn't, of course, have
direct ocular proof that they did unless he had stood with me yesterday
at the bottom of that wall while they on the top held up their skirts,
still what one has on underneath does somehow ooze through into one's
behaviour. I know once, when impelled by a heat wave in America to cast
aside the undergarments of a candid mind and buy and put on pink
chiffon, the pink chiffon instantly got through all my clothes into my
conduct, which became curiously dashing. Anybody can tell what a woman
has got on underneath by merely watching her behaviour. I have known
just the consciousness of silk stockings, worn by one accustomed only to
wool, produce dictatorialness where all before had been submission.


_August 19th_

I haven't written for three days because I have been so busy settling
down to my guests.

They call each other Kitty and Dolly. They explained that these were
inevitably their names because they were born, one fifty, the other
forty years ago. I inquired why this was inevitable, and they drew my
attention to fashions in names, asserting that people's ages could
generally be guessed by their Christian names. If, they said, their
birth had taken place ten years earlier they would have been Ethel and
Maud; if ten years later they would have been Muriel and Gladys; and if
twenty years only ago they had no doubt but what they would have been
Elizabeth and Pamela. It is always Mrs. Barnes who talks; but the effect
is as though they together were telling me things, because of the way
Mrs. Jewks smiles,--I conclude in agreement.

'Our dear parents, both long since dead,' said Mrs. Barnes, adjusting
her eyeglasses more comfortably on her nose, 'didn't seem to remember
that we would ever grow old, for we weren't even christened Katharine
and Dorothy, to which we might have reverted when we ceased being girls,
but we were Kitty and Dolly from the very beginning, and actually in
that condition came away from the font.'

'I like being Dolly,' murmured Mrs. Jewks.

Mrs. Barnes looked at her with what I thought was a slight uneasiness,
and rebuked her. 'You shouldn't,' she said. 'After thirty-nine no woman
should willingly be Dolly.'

'I still feel exactly _like_ Dolly,' murmured Mrs. Jewks.

'It's a misfortune,' said Mrs. Barnes, shaking her head. 'To be called
Dolly after a certain age is bad enough, but it is far worse to feel
like it. What I think of,' she said, turning to me, 'is when we are
really old,--in bath chairs, unable to walk, and no doubt being spoon
fed, and yet obliged to continue to be called by these names. It will
rob us of dignity.'

'I don't think I'll mind,' murmured Mrs. Jewks. 'I shall still feel
exactly _like_ Dolly.'

Mrs. Barnes looked at her, again I thought with uneasiness--with,
really, an air of rather anxious responsibility.

And afterwards, when her sister had gone indoors for something, she
expounded a theory she said she held, the soundness of which had often
been proved to her by events, that names had much influence on
behaviour.

'Not half as much,' I thought (but didn't say), 'as underclothes.' And
indeed I have for years been acquainted with somebody called Trixy, who
for steady gloom and heaviness of spirit would be hard to equal. Also I
know an Isolda; a most respectable married woman, of a sprightly humour
and much nimbleness in dodging big emotions.

'Dolly,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'has never, I am sorry to say, shared my
opinion. If she had, many things in her life would have been different,
for then she would have been on her guard as I have been. I am glad to
say there is nothing I have ever done since I ceased to be a child that
has been even remotely compatible with being called Kitty.'

I said I thought that was a great deal to be able to say. It suggested,
I said, quite an unusually blameless past. Through my brain ran for an
instant the vision of that devil who, seeking his tail, met Antoine in
the passage. I blushed. Fortunately Mrs. Barnes didn't notice.

'What did Dol--what did Mrs. Jewks do,' I said, 'that you think was the
direct result of her Christian name? Don't tell me if my question is
indiscreet, which I daresay it is, because I know I often am, but your
theory interests me.'

Mrs. Barnes hesitated a moment. She was, I think, turning over in her
mind whether she would give herself the relief of complete unreserve, or
continue for a few more days to skim round on the outskirts of
confidences. This was yesterday. After all, she had only been with me
two days.

She considered awhile, then decided that two days wasn't long enough, so
only said: 'My sister is sometimes a little rash,--or perhaps I should
say has been. But the effects of rashness are felt for a long time;
usually for the rest of one's life.'

'Yes,' I agreed; and thought ruefully of some of my own.

This, however, only made me if anything more inquisitive as to the exact
nature and quality of Dolly's resemblance to her name. We all, I suppose
(except Mrs. Barnes, who I am sure hasn't), have been rash, and if we
could induce ourselves to be frank much innocent amusement might be got
by comparing the results of our rashnesses. But Mrs. Barnes was unable
at the moment to induce herself to be frank, and she returned to the
subject she has already treated very fully since her arrival, the
wonderful bracing air up here and her great and grateful appreciation of
it.

To-day is Tuesday; and on Saturday evening,--the day they arrived back
again, complete with their luggage, which came up in a cart round by the
endless zigzags of the road while they with their peculiar dauntlessness
took the steep short cuts,--we had what might be called an exchange of
cards. Mrs. Barnes told me what she thought fit for me to know about her
late husband, and I responded by telling her and her sister what I
thought fit for them to know of my uncle the Dean.

There is such a lot of him that is fit to know that it took some time.
He was a great convenience. How glad I am I've got him. A dean, after
all, is of an impressive respectability as a relation. His apron covers
a multitude of family shortcomings. You can hold him up to the light,
and turn him round, and view him from every angle, and there is nothing
about him that doesn't bear inspection. All my relations aren't like
that. One at least, though he denies it, wasn't even born in wedlock.
We're not sure about the others, but we're quite sure about this one,
that he wasn't born altogether as he ought to have been. Except for his
obstinacy in denial he is a very attractive person. My uncle can't be
got to see that he exists. This makes him not able to like my uncle.

I didn't go beyond the Dean on Saturday night, for he had a most
satisfying effect on my new friends. Mrs. Barnes evidently thinks highly
of deans, and Mrs. Jewks, though she said nothing, smiled very
pleasantly while I held him up to view. No Lord Mayor was produced on
their side. I begin to think there isn't one. I begin to think their
self-respect is simply due to the consciousness that they are British.
Not that Mrs. Jewks says anything about it, but she smiles while Mrs.
Barnes talks on immensely patriotic lines. I gather they haven't been in
England for some time, so that naturally their affection for their
country has been fanned into a great glow. I know all about that sort of
glow. I have had it each time I've been out of England.


_August 20th._

Mrs. Barnes elaborated the story of him she speaks of always as Mr.
Barnes to-day.

He was, she said, a business man, and went to the city every day, where
he did things with hides: dried skins, I understood, that he bought and
resold. And though Mr. Barnes drew his sustenance from these hides with
what seemed to Mrs. Barnes great ease and abundance while he was alive,
after his death it was found that, through no fault of his own but
rather, she suggested, to his credit, he had for some time past been
living on his capital. This capital came to an end almost simultaneously
with Mr. Barnes, and all that was left for Mrs. Barnes to live on was
the house at Dulwich, handsomely furnished, it was true, with everything
of the best; for Mr. Barnes had disliked what Mrs. Barnes called
fandangles, and was all for mahogany and keeping a good table. But you
can't live on mahogany, said Mrs. Barnes, nor keep a good table with
nothing to keep it on, so she wished to sell the house and retire into
obscurity on the proceeds. Her brother-in-law, however, suggested paying
guests; so would she be able to continue in her home, even if on a
slightly different basis. Many people at that period were beginning to
take in paying guests. She would not, he thought, lose caste. Especially
if she restricted herself to real gentlefolk, who wouldn't allow her to
feel her position.

It was a little difficult at first, but she got used to it and was
doing very well when the war broke out. Then, of course, she had to
stand by Dolly. So she gave up her house and guests, and her means were
now very small; for somehow, remarked Mrs. Barnes, directly one wants to
sell nobody seems to want to buy, and she had had to let her beautiful
house go for very little--

'But why--' I interrupted; and pulled myself up.

I was just going to ask why Dolly hadn't gone to Mrs. Barnes and helped
with the paying guests, instead of Mrs. Barnes giving them up and going
to Dolly; but I stopped because I thought perhaps such a question,
seeing that they quite remarkably refrain from asking me questions,
might have been a little indiscreet at our present stage of intimacy.
No, I can't call it intimacy,--friendship, then. No, I can't call it
friendship either, yet; the only word at present is acquaintanceship.


_August 21st._

The conduct of my guests is so extraordinarily discreet, their careful
avoidance of curiosity, of questions, is so remarkable, that I can but
try to imitate. They haven't asked me a single thing. I positively
thrust the Dean on them. They make no comment on anything either,
except the situation and the view. We seem to talk if not only certainly
chiefly about that. We haven't even got to books yet. I still don't know
about _The Rosary_. Once or twice when I have been alone with Mrs.
Barnes she has begun to talk of Dolly, who appears to fill most of her
thoughts, but each time she has broken off in the middle and resumed her
praises of the situation and the view. I haven't been alone at all yet
with Dolly; nor, though Mr. Barnes has been dwelt upon in detail, have I
been told anything about Mr. Jewks.


_August 22nd._

Impetuosity sometimes gets the better of me, and out begins to rush a
question; but up to now I have succeeded in catching it and strangling
it before it is complete. For perhaps my new friends have been very
unhappy, just as I have been very unhappy, and they may be struggling
out of it just as I am, still with places in their memories that hurt
too much for them to dare to touch. Perhaps it is only by silence and
reserve that they can manage to be brave.

There are no signs, though, of anything of the sort on their composed
faces; but then neither, I think, would they see any signs of such
things on mine. The moment as it passes is, I find, somehow a gay thing.
Somebody says something amusing, and I laugh; somebody is kind, and I am
happy. Just the smell of a flower, the turn of a sentence, anything, the
littlest thing, is enough to make the passing moment gay to me. I am
sure my guests can't tell by looking at me that I have ever been
anything but cheerful; and so I, by looking at them, wouldn't be able to
say that they have ever been anything but composed,--Mrs. Barnes
composed and grave, Mrs. Jewks composed and smiling.

But I refuse now to jump at conclusions in the nimble way I used to.
Even about Mrs. Barnes, who would seem to be an untouched monument of
tranquillity, a cave of calm memories, I can no longer be sure. And so
we sit together quietly on the terrace, and are as presentable as so
many tidy, white-curtained houses in a decent street. We don't know what
we've got inside us each of disorder, of discomfort, of anxieties.
Perhaps there is nothing; perhaps my friends are as tidy and quiet
inside as out. Anyhow up to now we have kept ourselves to ourselves, as
Mrs. Barnes would say, and we make a most creditable show.

Only I don't believe in that keeping oneself to oneself attitude. Life
is too brief to waste any of it being slow in making friends. I have a
theory--Mrs. Barnes isn't the only one of us three who has
theories--that reticence is a stuffy, hampering thing. Except about
one's extremest bitter grief, which is, like one's extremest joy of
love, too deeply hidden away with God to be told of, one should be
without reserves. And if one makes mistakes, and if the other person
turns out to have been unworthy of being treated frankly and goes away
and distorts, it can't be helped,--one just takes the risk. For isn't
anything better than distrust, and the slowness and selfish fear of
caution? Isn't anything better than not doing one's fellow creatures the
honour of taking it for granted that they are, women and all, gentlemen?
Besides, how lonely....


_August 23rd._

The sun goes on blazing, and we go on sitting in the shade in a row.

Mrs. Barnes does a great deal of knitting. She knits socks for soldiers
all day. She got into this habit during the war, when she sent I don't
know how many pairs a year to the trenches, and now she can't stop. I
suppose these will go to charitable institutions, for although the war
has left off there are, as Mrs. Jewks justly said, still legs in the
world.

This remark I think came under the heading Dolly in Mrs. Barnes's mind,
for she let her glance rest a moment on her sister in a kind of
affectionate concern.

Mrs. Jewks hasn't said much yet, but each time she has said anything I
have liked it. Usually she murmurs, almost as if she didn't want Mrs.
Barnes to hear, yet couldn't help saying what she says. She too knits,
but only, I think, because her sister likes to see her sitting beside
her doing it, and never for long at a time. Her chief occupation, I have
discovered, is to read aloud to Mrs. Barnes.

This wasn't done in my presence the first four days out of consideration
for me, for everybody doesn't like being read to, Mrs. Barnes explained
afterwards; but they went upstairs after lunch to their rooms,--to
sleep, as I supposed, knowing how well they do that, and it was only
gradually that I realised, from the monotonous gentle drone coming
through the window to where I lay below on the grass, that it wasn't
Mrs. Barnes giving long drawn-out counsel to Mrs. Jewks on the best way
to cope with the dangers of being Dolly, but that it was Mrs. Jewks
reading aloud.

After that I suggested they should do this on the terrace, where it is
so much cooler than anywhere else in the afternoon; so now, reassured
that it in no way disturbs me--Mrs. Barnes's politeness and sense of
duty as a guest never flags for a moment--this is what happens, and it
happens in the mornings also. For, says Mrs. Barnes, how much better it
is to study what persons of note have said than waste the hours of life
saying things oneself.

They read biographies and histories, but only those, I gather, that are
not recent; and sometimes, Mrs. Barnes said, they lighten what Mrs.
Jewks described in a murmur as these more solid forms of fiction by
reading a really good novel.

I asked Mrs. Barnes with much interest about the novel. What were the
really good ones they had read? And I hung on the answer, for here was
something we could talk about that wasn't either the situation or the
view and yet was discreet.

'Ah,' she said, shaking her head, 'there are very few really good
novels. We don't care, of course, except for the very best, and they
don't appear to be printed nowadays.'

'I expect the very best are unprintable,' murmured Mrs. Jewks, her head
bent over her knitting, for it was one of the moments when she too was
engaged on socks.

'There used to be very good novels,' continued Mrs. Barnes, who hadn't I
think heard her, 'but of recent years they have indeed been few. I begin
to fear we shall never again see a Thackeray or a Trollope. And yet I
have a theory--and surely these two writers prove it--that it is
possible to be both wholesome and clever.'

'I don't want to see any more Thackerays and Trollopes,' murmured Mrs.
Jewks. 'I've seen them. Now I want to see something different.'

This sentence was too long for Mrs. Barnes not to notice, and she looked
at me as one who should say, 'There. What did I tell you? Her name
unsettles her.'

There was a silence.

'Our father,' then said Mrs. Barnes, with so great a gravity of tone
that for a moment I thought she was unaccountably and at eleven o'clock
in the morning going to embark on the Lord's Prayer, 'knew Thackeray. He
mixed with him.'

And as I wasn't quite sure whether this was a rebuke for Dolly or
information for me, I kept quiet.

As, however, Mrs. Barnes didn't continue, I began to feel that perhaps I
was expected to say something. So I did.

'That,' I said, 'must have been very--'

I searched round for an enthusiastic word, but couldn't find one. It is
unfortunate how I can never think of any words more enthusiastic than
what I am feeling. They seem to disappear; and urged by politeness, or a
desire to please, I frantically hunt for them in a perfectly empty mind.
The nearest approach to one that I found this morning was Enjoyable. I
don't think much of Enjoyable. It is a watery word; but it was all I
found, so I said it. 'That must have been very enjoyable,' I said; and
even I could hear that my voice was without excitement.

Mrs. Jewks looked at me and smiled.

'It was more than enjoyable,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'it was elevating. Dolly
used to feel just as I do about it,' she added, her eye reproachfully on
her sister. 'It is not Thackeray's fault that she no longer does.'

'It's only because I've finished with him,' said Mrs. Jewks
apologetically. 'Now I want something _different_.'

'Dolly and I,' explained Mrs. Barnes to me, 'don't always see alike. I
have a theory that one doesn't finish with the Immortals.'

'Would you put Thackeray--' I began diffidently.

Mrs. Barnes stopped me at once.

'Our father,' she said--again my hands instinctively wanted to
fold--'who was an excellent judge, indeed a specialist if I may say so,
placed him among the Immortals. Therefore I am content to leave him
there.'

'But isn't that filial piety rather than--' I began again, still
diffident but also obstinate.

'In any case,' interrupted Mrs. Barnes, raising her hand as though I
were the traffic, 'I shall never forget the influence he and the other
great writers of the period had upon the boys.'

'The boys?' I couldn't help inquiring, in spite of this being an
interrogation.

'Our father educated boys. On an unusual and original system. Being
devoid of the classics, which he said was all the better because then he
hadn't to spend any time remembering them, he was a devoted English
linguist. Accordingly he taught boys English,--foreign boys, because
English boys naturally know it already, and his method was to make them
minutely acquainted with the great novels,--the great wholesome novels
of that period. Not a French, or Dutch, or Italian boy but went home--'

'Or German,' put in Mrs. Jewks. 'Most of them were Germans.'

Mrs. Barnes turned red. 'Let us forget them,' she said, with a wave of
her hand. 'It is my earnest desire,' she continued, looking at me, 'to
forget Germans.'

'Do let us,' I said politely.

'Not one of the boys,' she then went on, 'but returned to his country
with a knowledge of the colloquial English of the best period, and of
the noble views of that period as expressed by the noblest men,
unobtainable by any other method. Our father called himself a
Non-Grammarian. The boys went home knowing no rules of grammar, yet
unable to talk incorrectly. Thackeray himself was the grammar, and his
characters the teachers. And so was Dickens, but not quite to the same
extent, because of people like Sam Weller who might have taught the boys
slang. Thackeray was immensely interested when our father wrote and told
him about the school, and once when he was in London he invited him to
lunch.'

Not quite clear as to who was in London and which invited which, I said,
'Who?'

'It was our father who went to London,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'and was most
kindly entertained by Thackeray.'

'He went because he wasn't there already,' explained Mrs. Jewks.

'Dolly means,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'that he did not live in London. Our
father was an Oxford man. Not in the narrow, technical meaning that has
come to be attached to the term, but in the simple natural sense of
living there. It was there that we were born, and there that we grew up
in an atmosphere of education. We saw it all round us going on in the
different colleges, and we saw it in detail and at first hand in our own
home. For we too were brought up on Thackeray and Dickens, in whom our
father said we would find everything girls needed to know and nothing
that, they had better not.'

'I used to have a perfect _itch_,' murmured Mrs. Jewks, 'to know the
things I had better not.'

And Mrs. Barnes again looked at me as one who should say, 'There. What
did I tell you? Such a word, too. Itch.'

There was a silence. I could think of nothing to say that wouldn't
appear either inquisitive or to be encouraging Dolly.

Mrs. Barnes sits between us. This arrangement of our chairs on the grass
happened apparently quite naturally the first day, and now has become
one that I feel I mustn't disturb. For me to drop into the middle chair
would somehow now be impossible. It is Mrs. Barnes's place. Yet I do
want to sit next to Mrs. Jewks and talk to her. Or better still, go for
a walk with her. But Mrs. Barnes always goes for the walks, either with
or without me, but never without Mrs. Jewks. She hasn't yet left us once
alone together. If anything needs fetching it is Mrs. Jewks who fetches
it. They don't seem to want to write letters, but if they did I expect
they would both go in to write them at the same time.

I do think, though, that we are growing a little more intimate. At least
to-day we have talked of something that wasn't the view. I shouldn't be
surprised if in another week, supposing the hot weather lasts so long, I
shall be asking Mrs. Barnes outright what it is Dolly did that has
apparently so permanently unnerved her sister.

But suppose she retaliated by asking me,--oh, there are so many things
she could ask me that I couldn't answer! Except with the shameful,
exposing answer of beginning very helplessly to cry....


_August 24th._

Last night I ran after Mrs. Jewks just as she was disappearing into her
room and said, 'I'm going to call you Dolly. I don't like Jewks. How do
you spell it?'

'What--Dolly?' she asked, smiling.

'No--Jewks.'

But Mrs. Barnes came out of her bedroom and said, 'Did we forget to bid
you goodnight? How very remiss of us.'

And we all smiled at each other, and went into our rooms, and shut the
doors.


_August 25th._

The behaviour of time is a surprising thing. I can't think how it
manages to make weeks sometimes seem like minutes and days sometimes
seem like years. Those weeks I was here alone seemed not longer than a
few minutes. These days since my guests came seem to have gone on for
months.

I suppose it is because they have been so tightly packed. Nobody coming
up the path and seeing the three figures sitting quietly on the terrace,
the middle one knitting, the right-hand one reading aloud, the
left-hand one sunk apparently in stupor, would guess that these
creatures' days were packed. Many an honest slug stirred by creditable
desires has looked more animate than we. Yet the days _are_ packed.
Mine, at any rate, are. Packed tight with an immense monotony.

Every day we do exactly the same things: breakfast, read aloud; lunch,
read aloud; tea, go for a walk; supper, read aloud; exhaustion; bed. How
quick and short it is to write down, and how endless to live. At meals
we talk, and on the walk we talk, or rather we say things. At meals the
things we say are about food, and on the walk they are about mountains.
The rest of the time we don't talk, because of the reading aloud. That
fills up every gap; that muzzles all conversation.

I don't know whether Mrs. Barnes is afraid I'll ask questions, or
whether she is afraid Dolly will start answering questions that I
haven't asked; I only know that she seems to have decided that safety
lies in putting an extinguisher on talk. At the same time she is most
earnest in her endeavours to be an agreeable guest, and is all
politeness; but so am I, most earnest for my part in my desire to be an
agreeable hostess, and we are both so dreadfully polite and so horribly
considerate that things end by being exactly as I would prefer them not
to be.

For instance, finding Merivale--it is Merivale's _History of the Romans
under the Empire_ that is being read--finding him too much like Gibbon
gone sick and filled with water, a Gibbon with all the kick taken out of
him, shorn of his virility and his foot-notes, yesterday I didn't go and
sit on the terrace after breakfast, but took a volume of the authentic
Gibbon and departed by the back door for a walk.

It is usually, I know, a bad sign when a hostess begins to use the back
door, but it wasn't a sign of anything in this case except a great
desire to get away from Merivale. After lunch, when, strengthened by my
morning, I prepared to listen to some more of him, I found the chairs on
the terrace empty, and from the window of Mrs. Barnes's room floated
down the familiar muffled drone of the first four days.

So then I went for another walk, and thought. And the result was polite
affectionate protests at tea-time, decorated with some amiable untruths
about domestic affairs having called me away--God forgive me, but I
believe I said it was the laundress--and such real distress on Mrs.
Barnes's part at the thought of having driven me off my own terrace,
that now so as to shield her from thinking anything so painful to her I
must needs hear Merivale to the end.

'Dolly,' I said, meeting her by some strange chance alone on the stairs
going down to supper--invariably the sisters go down together--'do you
like reading aloud?'

I said it very quickly and under my breath, for at the bottom of the
stairs would certainly be Mrs. Barnes.

'No,' she said, also under her breath.

'Then why do you do it?'

'Do you like listening?' she whispered, smiling.

'No,' I said.

'Then why do you do it?'

'Because--' I said. 'Well, because--'

She nodded and smiled. 'Yes,' she whispered, 'that's my reason too.'


_August 26th._

All day to-day I have emptied myself of any wishes of my own and tried
to be the perfect hostess. I have given myself up to Mrs. Barnes, and on
the walk I followed where she led, and I made no suggestions when paths
crossed though I have secret passionate preferences in paths, and I
rested on the exact spot she chose in spite of knowing there was a much
prettier one just round the corner, and I joined with her in admiring a
view I didn't really like. In fact I merged myself in Mrs. Barnes,
sitting by her on the mountain side in much the spirit of Wordsworth,
when he sat by his cottage fire without ambition, hope or aim.


_August 27th._

The weather blazes along in its hot beauty. Each morning, the first
thing I see when I open my eyes is the great patch of golden light on
the wall near my bed that means another perfect day. Nearly always the
sky is cloudless--a deep, incredible blue. Once or twice, when I have
gone quite early to my window towards the east, I have seen what looked
to my sleepy eyes like a flock of little angels floating slowly along
the tops of the mountains, or at any rate, if not the angels themselves,
delicate bright tufts of feathers pulled out of their wings. These
objects, on waking up more completely, I have perceived to be clouds;
and then I have thought that perhaps that day there would be rain. But
there never has been rain.

The clouds have floated slowly away to Italy, and left us to another day
of intense, burning heat.

I don't believe the weather will ever break up. Not, anyhow, for a long
time. Not, anyhow, before I have heard Merivale to the end.


_August 28th._

In the morning when I get up and go and look out of my window at the
splendid east I don't care about Merivale. I defy him. And I make up my
mind that though my body may be present at the reading of him so as to
avoid distressing Mrs. Barnes and driving her off the terrace--we are
minute in our care not to drive each other off the terrace--my ears
shall be deaf to him and my imagination shall wander. Who is Merivale,
that he shall burden my memory with even shreds of his unctuous
imitations? And I go down to breakfast with a fortified and shining
spirit, as one who has arisen refreshed and determined from prayer, and
out on the terrace I do shut my ears. But I think there must be chinks
in them, for I find my mind is much hung about, after all, with
Merivale. Bits of him. Bits like this.

_Propertius is deficient in that light touch and exquisitely polished
taste which volatilize the sensuality and flattery of Horace. The
playfulness of the Sabine bard is that of the lapdog, while the Umbrian
reminds us of the pranks of a clumsier and less tolerated quadruped._

This is what you write if you want to write like Gibbon, and yet remain
at the same time a rector and chaplain to the Speaker of the House of
Commons; and this bit kept on repeating itself in my head like a tune
during luncheon to-day. It worried me that I couldn't decide what the
clumsier and less tolerated quadruped was.

'A donkey,' said Mrs. Jewks, on my asking my guests what they thought.

'Surely yes--an ass,' said Mrs. Barnes, whose words are always picked.

'But why should a donkey be less tolerated than a lapdog?' I asked. 'I
would tolerate it more. If I might tolerate only one, it would certainly
be the donkey.'

'Perhaps he means a flea,' suggested Mrs. Jewks.

'Dolly,' said Mrs. Barnes.

'But fleas do go in for pranks, and are less tolerated than lapdogs,'
said Mrs. Jewks.

'Dolly,' said Mrs. Barnes again.

'Except that,' I said, not heeding Mrs. Barnes for a moment in my
pleasure at having got away from the usual luncheon-table talk of food,
'haven't fleas got more than four legs?'

'That's centipedes,' said Dolly.

'Then it's two legs that they've got.'

'That's birds,' said Dolly.

We looked at each other and began to laugh. It was the first time we had
laughed, and once we had begun we laughed and laughed, in that foolish
way one does about completely idiotic things when one knows one oughtn't
to and hasn't for a long while.

There sat Mrs. Barnes, straight and rocky, with worried eyes. She never
smiled; and indeed why should she? But the more she didn't smile the
more we laughed,--helplessly, ridiculously. It was dreadful to laugh,
dreadful to mention objects that distressed her as vulgar; and because
it was dreadful and we knew it was dreadful, we couldn't stop. So was I
once overcome with deplorable laughter in church, only because a cat
came in. So have I seen an ill-starred woman fall a prey to unseasonable
mirth at a wedding. We laughed positively to tears. We couldn't stop. I
did try to. I was really greatly ashamed. For I was doing what I now
feel in all my bones is the thing Mrs. Barnes dreads most,--I was
encouraging Dolly.

Afterwards, when we had settled down to Merivale, and Dolly finding she
had left the book upstairs went in to fetch it, I begged Mrs. Barnes to
believe that I wasn't often quite so silly and didn't suppose I would be
like that again.

She was very kind, and laid her hand for a moment on mine,--such a bony
hand, marked all over, I thought as I looked down at it, with the traces
of devotion and self-sacrifice. That hand had never had leisure to get
fat. It may have had it in the spacious days of Mr. Barnes, but the
years afterwards had certainly been lean ones; and since the war, since
the selling of her house and the beginning of the evidently wearing
occupation of what she had called standing by Dolly, the years, I
understand, have been so lean that they were practically bone.

'I think,' she said, 'I have perhaps got into the way of being too
serious. It is because Dolly, I consider, is not serious enough. If she
were more so I would be less so, and that would be better for us both.
Oh, you musn't suppose,' she added, 'that I cannot enjoy a joke as
merrily as anybody.' And she smiled broadly and amazingly at me, the
rockiest, most determined smile.

'There wasn't any joke, and we were just absurd,' I said penitently, in
my turn laying my hand on hers. 'Forgive me. I'm always sorry and
ashamed when I have behaved as though I were ten. I do try not to, but
sometimes it comes upon one unexpectedly--'

'Dolly is a little old to behave as though she were ten,' said Mrs.
Barnes, in sorrow rather than in anger.

'And I'm a little old too. It's very awkward when you aren't so old
inside as you are outside. For years I've been trying to be dignified,
and I'm always being tripped up by a kind of apparently incurable
natural effervescence.'

Mrs. Barnes looked grave.

'That is what is the matter with Dolly,' she said. 'Just that. How
strange that you should have met. For it isn't usual. I cannot believe
it is usual. All her troubles have been caused by it. I do not, however,
regard it as incurable. On the contrary--I have helped her to check it,
and she is much better than she was.'

'But what are you afraid she will do _now_?' I asked; and Dolly, coming
out with, the book under her arm and that funny little air of jauntiness
that triumphs when she walks over her sobering black skirt and white
cotton petticoat, prevented my getting an answer.

But I felt in great sympathy with Mrs. Barnes. And when, starting for
our walk after tea, something happened to Dolly's boot--I think the heel
came off--and she had to turn back, I gladly went on alone with her
sister, hoping that perhaps she would continue to talk on these more
intimate lines.

And so she did.

'Dolly,' she said almost immediately, almost before we had got round the
turn of the path, 'is the object of my tenderest solicitude and love.'

'I know. I see that,' I said, sympathetically.

'She was the object of my love from the moment when she was laid, a new
born baby, in the arms of the little ten year old girl I was then, and
she became, as she grew up and developed the characteristics I associate
with her name, the object of my solicitude. Indeed, of my concern.'

'I wish,' I said, as she stopped and I began to be afraid this once more
was to be all and the shutters were going to be shut again, 'we might
be real friends.'

'Are we not?' asked Mrs. Barnes, looking anxious, as though she feared
she had failed somewhere in her duties as a guest.

'Oh yes--we are friends of course, but I meant by real friends people
who talk together about anything and everything. _Almost_ anything and
everything,' I amended. 'People who tell each other things,' I went on
hesitatingly. '_Most_ things,' I amended.

'I have a great opinion of discretion,' said Mrs. Barnes.

'I am sure you have. But don't you think that sometimes the very essence
of real friendship consists in--'

'Mr. Barnes always had his own dressing-room.'

This was unexpected, and it silenced me. After a moment I said lamely,
'I'm sure he did. But you were saying about Dol--about Mrs. Jewks--'

'Yes.' Mrs. Barnes sighed. 'Well, it cannot harm you or her,' she went
on after a pause, 'for me to tell you that the first thing Dolly did as
soon as she was grown up was to make an impetuous marriage.'

'Isn't that rather what most of us begin with?'

'Few are so impetuous. Mine, for instance, was not. Mine was the
considered union of affection with regard, entered into properly in the
eye of all men, and accompanied by the good wishes of relations and
friends. Dolly's--well, Dolly's was impetuous. I cannot say
ill-advised, because she asked no one's advice. She plunged--it is not
too strong a word, and unfortunately can be applied to some of her
subsequent movements--into a misalliance, and in order to contract it
she let herself down secretly at night from her bedroom window by means
of a sheet.'

Mrs. Barnes paused.

'How very--how very spirited,' I couldn't help murmuring.

Indeed I believe I felt a little jealous. Nothing in my own past
approaches this in enterprise. And I not only doubted if I would ever
have had the courage to commit myself to a sheet, but I felt a momentary
vexation that no one had ever suggested that on his account I should.
Compared to Dolly, I am a poor thing.

'So you can understand,' continued Mrs. Barnes, 'how earnestly I wish to
keep my sister to lines of normal conduct. She has been much punished
for her departures from them. I am very anxious that nothing should be
said to her that might seem--well, that might seem to be even slightly
in sympathy with actions or ways of looking at life that have in the
past brought her unhappiness, and can only in the future bring her yet
more.'

'But why,' I asked, still thinking of the sheet, 'didn't she go out to
be married through the front door?'

'Because our father would never have allowed his front door to be used
for such a marriage. You forget that it was a school, and she was
running away with somebody who up till a year or two previously had been
one of the pupils.'

'Oh? Did she marry a foreigner?'

Mrs. Barnes flushed a deep, painful red. She is brown and
weather-beaten, yet through the brownness spread unmistakeably this deep
red. Obviously she had forgotten what she told me the other day about
the boys all being foreigners.

'Let us not speak evil of the dead,' she said with awful solemnity; and
for the rest of the walk would talk of nothing but the view.

But in my room to-night I have been thinking. There are guests and
guests, and some guests haunt one. These guests are that kind. They
wouldn't haunt me so much if only we could be really friends; but we'll
never be really friends as long as I am kept from talking to Dolly and
between us is fixed the rugged and hitherto unscaleable barrier of Mrs.
Barnes. Perhaps to-morrow, if I have the courage, I shall make a great
attempt at friendship,--at what Mrs. Barnes would call being thoroughly
indiscreet. For isn't it senseless for us three women, up here alone
together, to spend the precious days when we might be making friends for
life hiding away from each other? Why can't I be told outright that
Dolly married a German? Evidently she did; and if she could bear it I am
sure I can. Twenty years ago it might have happened to us all. Twenty
years ago I might have done it myself, except that there wasn't the
German living who would have got me to go down a sheet for him. And
anyhow Dolly's German is dead; and doesn't even a German leave off being
one after he is dead? Wouldn't he naturally incline, by the sheer action
of time, to dissolve into neutrality? It doesn't seem humane to pursue
him into the recesses of eternity as an alien enemy. Besides, I thought
the war was over.

For a long while to-night I have been leaning out of my window
thinking. When I look at the stars I don't mind about Germans. It seems
impossible to. I believe if Mrs. Barnes would look at them she wouldn't
be nearly so much worried. It is a very good practice, I think, to lean
out of one's window for a space before going to bed and let the cool
darkness wash over one. After being all day with people, how blessed a
thing it is not to be with them. The night to-night is immensely silent,
and I've been standing so quiet, so motionless that I would have heard
the smallest stirring of a leaf. But nothing is stirring. The air is
quite still. There isn't a sound. The mountains seem to be brooding over
a valley that has gone to sleep.


_August 29th._

Antoine said to me this morning that he thought if _ces dames_--so he
always speaks of Mrs. Barnes and Dolly--were going to stay any time,
perhaps an assistant for Mrs. Antoine had better be engaged; because
Mrs. Antoine might otherwise possibly presently begin to find the
combination of heat and visitors a little--

'Of course,' I said. 'Naturally she might. I regret, Antoine, that I did
not think of this. Why did you not point it out sooner? I will go
myself this very day and search for an assistant.'

Antoine said that such exertions were not for Madame, and that it was he
who would search for the assistant.

I said he couldn't possibly leave the chickens and the cow, and that it
was I who would search for the assistant.

So that is what I have been doing all day--having a most heavenly time
wandering from village to village along the mountain side, my knapsack
over my arm and freedom in my heart. The knapsack had food in it and a
volume of Crabbe, because it was impossible to tell how long the search
might last, and I couldn't not be nourished. I explained to my guests
how easily I mightn't be back till the evening, I commended them to the
special attentiveness of the Antoines, and off I went, accompanied by
Mrs. Barnes's commiseration that I should have to be engaged on so hot a
day in what she with felicitous exactness called a domestic pursuit, and
trying very hard not to be too evidently pleased.

I went to the villages that lie in the direction of my lovely place of
larches, and having after some search found the assistant I continued
on towards the west, walking fast, almost as if people would know I had
accomplished what I had come out for, and might catch me and take me
home again.

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 must, 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 reason 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.

We went for a dreary walk this afternoon. Mrs. Barnes was watchful, and
Dolly was meek. I tried to be sprightly, but one can't be sprightly by
oneself.


_September 3rd._

In the night there was a thunderstorm, and for the first time since I
got here I woke up to rain and mist. The mist was pouring in in waves
through the open windows, and the room was quite cold. When I looked at
the thermometer hanging outside, I saw it had dropped twenty degrees.

We have become so much used to fine weather arrangements that the sudden
change caused an upheaval. I heard much hurrying about downstairs, and
when I went down to breakfast found it was laid in the hall. It was like
breakfasting in a tomb, after the radiance of our meals out of doors.
The front door was shut; the rain pattered on the windows; and right up
against the panes, between us and the world like a great grey flannel
curtain, hung the mist. It might have been some particularly odious
December morning in England.

'_C'est l'automne_,' said Antoine, bringing in three cane chairs and
putting them round the tea-table on which the breakfast was laid.

'_C'est un avertissement_,' said Mrs. Antoine, bringing in the coffee.

Antoine then said that he had conceived it possible that Madame and _ces
dames_ might like a small wood fire. To cheer. To enliven.

'Pray not on our account,' instantly said Mrs. Barnes to me, very
earnestly. 'Dolly and I do not feel the cold at all, I assure you. Pray
do not have one on our account.'

'But wouldn't it be cosy--' I began, who am like a cat about warmth.

'I would far rather you did not have one,' said Mrs. Barnes, her
features puckered.

'Think of all the wood!'

'But it would only be a few logs--'

'What is there nowadays so precious as logs? And it is far, far too
early to begin fires. Why, only last week it was still August. Still the
dog-days.'

'But if we're cold--'

'We should indeed be poor creatures, Dolly and I, if the moment it left
off being warm we were cold. Please do not think we don't appreciate
your kindness in wishing to give us a fire, but Dolly and I would feel
it very much if our being here were to make you begin fires so early.'

'But--'

'Keep the logs for later on. Let me beg you.'

So we didn't have a fire; and there we sat, Mrs. Barnes with the white
shawl at last put to its proper use, and all of us trying not to shiver.

After breakfast, which was taken away bodily, table and all, snatched
from our midst by the Antoines, so that we were left sitting facing each
other round empty space with a curious sensation of sudden nakedness, I
supposed that Merivale would be produced, so I got up and pushed a
comfortable chair conveniently for Dolly, and turned on the light.

To my surprise I found Mrs. Barnes actually preferred to relinquish the
reading aloud rather than use my electric light in the daytime. It would
be an unpardonable extravagance, she said. Dolly could work at her
knitting. Neither of them needed their eyes for knitting.

I was greatly touched. From the first she has shown a touching, and at
the same time embarrassing, concern not to cause me avoidable expense,
but never yet such concern as this. I know what store she sets by the
reading. Why, if we just sat there in the gloom we might begin to say
things. I really was very much touched.

But indeed Mrs. Barnes is touching. It is because she is so touching in
her desire not to give trouble, to make us happy, that one so
continually does exactly what she wishes. I would do almost anything
sooner than hurt Mrs. Barnes. Also I would do almost anything to calm
her. And as for her adhesiveness to an unselfish determination, it is
such that it is mere useless fatigue to try to separate her from it.

I have learned this gradually.

At first, most of my time at meals was spent in reassuring her that
things hadn't been got specially on her and Dolly's account, and as the
only other account they could have been got on was mine, my assurances
had the effect of making me seem very greedy. I thought I lived frugally
up here, but Mrs. Barnes must have lived so much more frugally that
almost everything is suspected by her to be a luxury provided by my
hospitality.

She was, for instance, so deeply persuaded that the apricots were got,
as she says, specially, that at last to calm her I had to tell Mrs.
Antoine to buy no more. And we all liked apricots. And there was a
perfect riot of them down in the valley. After that we had red currants
because they, Mrs. Barnes knew, came out of the garden; but we didn't
eat them because we didn't like them.

Then there was a jug of lemonade sent in every day for lunch that
worried her. During this period her talk was entirely of lemons and
sugar, of all the lemons and sugar that wouldn't be being used if she
and Dolly were again, in order to calm her, and rather than that she
should be made unhappy, I told Mrs. Antoine to send in only water.

Cakes disappeared from tea a week ago. Eggs have survived at breakfast,
and so has honey, because Mrs. Barnes can hear the chickens and has seen
the bees and knows they are not things got specially. She will eat
potatoes and cabbages and anything else that the garden produces with
serenity, but grows restive over meat; and a leg of mutton made her
miserable yesterday, for nothing would make her believe that if I had
been here alone it wouldn't have been a cutlet.

'Let there be no more legs of mutton,' I said to Mrs. Antoine
afterwards. 'Let there instead be three cutlets.'

I'm afraid Mrs. Antoine is scandalised at the inhospitable rigours she
supposes me to be applying to my guests. My order to Antoine this
morning not to light the fire will have increased her growing suspicion
that I am developing into a cheese-paring Madame. She must have
expressed her fears to Antoine; for the other day, when I told her to
leave the sugar and lemons out of the lemonade and send in only the
water, she looked at him, and as I went away I heard her saying to him
in a low voice--he no doubt having told her I usedn't to be like this,
and she being unable to think of any other explanation--'_C'est la
guerre_.'

About eleven, having done little good by my presence in the hall whose
cheerlessness wrung from me a thoughtless exclamation that I wished I
smoked a pipe, upon which Dolly instantly said, 'Wouldn't it be a
comfort,' and Mrs. Barnes said, 'Dolly,' I went away to the kitchen,
pretending I wanted to ask what there was for dinner but really so as to
be for a few moments where there was a fire.

Mrs. Antoine watched me warming myself with respectful disapproval.

'_Madame devrait faire faire un peu de feu dans la halle_,' she said.
'_Ces dames auront bien froid_.'

'_Ces dames_ won't let me,' I tried to explain in the most passionate
French I could think of. '_Ces dames_ implore me not to have a fire.
_Ces dames_ reject a fire. _Ces dames_ defend themselves against a fire.
I perish because of the resolve of _ces dames_ not to have a fire.'

But Mrs. Antoine plainly didn't believe me. She thought, I could see,
that I was practising a repulsive parsimony on defenceless guests. It
was the sorrows of the war, she concluded, that had changed Madame's
nature. This was the kindest, the only possible, explanation.


_Evening._

There was a knock at my door just then. I thought it must be Mrs.
Antoine come to ask me some domestic question, and said _Entrez,_ and
it was Mrs. Barnes.

She has not before this penetrated into my bedroom. I hope I didn't look
too much surprised. I think there could hardly have been a gap of more
than a second between my surprise and my recovered hospitality.

'Oh--_do_ come in,' I said. 'How nice of you.'

Thus do the civilised clothe their real sensations in splendid robes of
courtesy.

'Dolly and I haven't driven you away from the hall, I hope?' began Mrs.
Barnes in a worried voice.

'I only came up here for a minute,' I explained, 'and was coming down
again directly.'

'Oh, that relieves me. I was afraid perhaps--'

'I wish you wouldn't so often be afraid you're driving me away,' I said
pleasantly. 'Do I look driven?'

But Mrs. Barnes took no notice of my pleasantness. She had something on
her mind. She looked like somebody who is reluctant and yet impelled.

'I think,' she said solemnly, 'that if you have a moment to spare it
might be a good opportunity for a little talk. I would like to talk
with you a little.'

And she stood regarding me, her eyes full of reluctant but unconquerable
conscientiousness.

'Do,' I said, with polite enthusiasm. 'Do.'

This was the backwash, I thought, of Dolly's German outbreak the other
day, and Siegfried was going at last to be explained to me.

'Won't you sit down in this chair?' I said, pushing a comfortable one
forward, and then sitting down myself on the edge of the sofa.

'Thank you. What I wish to say is--'

She hesitated. I supposed her to be finding it difficult to proceed with
Siegfried, and started off impulsively to her rescue.

'You know, I don't mind a bit about--' I began.

'What I wish to say is,' she went on again, before I had got out the
fatal word, 'what I wish to point out to you--is that the weather has
considerably cooled.'

This was so remote from Siegfried that I looked at her a moment in
silence. Then I guessed what was coming, and tried to put it off.

'Ah,' I said--for I dreaded, the grateful things she would be sure to
say about having been here so long--'you do want a fire in the hall
after all, then.'

'No, no. We are quite warm enough, I assure you. A fire would distress
us. What I wish to say is--' Again she hesitated, then went on more
firmly, 'Well, I wish to say that the weather having broken and the
great heat having come to an end, the reasons which made you extend your
kind, your delightful hospitality to us, have come to an end also. I
need hardly tell you that we never, never shall be able to express to
you--'

'Oh, but you're not going to give me notice?' I interrupted, trying to
be sprightly and to clamber over her rock-like persistence in gratitude
with the gaiety of a bright autumnal creeper. This was because I was
nervous. I grow terribly sprightly when I am nervous.

But indeed I shrink from Mrs. Barnes's gratitude. It abases me to the
dust. It leaves me mourning in much the same way that Simon Lee's
gratitude left Wordsworth mourning. I can't bear it. What a world it is,
I want to cry out,--what a miserable, shameful, battering, crushing
world, when so dreadfully little makes people so dreadfully glad!

Then it suddenly struck me that the expression giving notice might not
be taken by Mrs. Barnes, she being solemn, in the spirit in which it was
offered by me, I being sprightly; and, desperately afraid of having
possibly offended her, I seized on the first thing I could think of as
most likely to soothe her, which was an extension, glowing and almost
indefinite, of my invitation. 'Because, you know,' I said, swept along
by this wish to prevent a wound, 'I won't accept the notice. I'm not
going to let you go. That is, of course,' I added, 'if you and Dolly
don't mind the quiet up here and the monotony. Won't you stay on here
till I go away myself?'

Mrs. Barnes opened her mouth to speak, but I got up quickly and crossed
over to her and kissed her. Instinct made me go and kiss her, so as to
gain a little time, so as to put off the moment of having to hear
whatever it was she was going to say; for whether she accepted the
invitation or refused it, I knew there would be an equally immense,
unbearable number of grateful speeches.

But when I went over and kissed her Mrs. Barnes put her arm round my
neck and held me tight; and there was something in this sudden movement
on the part of one so chary of outward signs of affection that made my
heart give a little leap of response, and I found myself murmuring into
her ear--amazing that I should be murmuring into Mrs. Barnes's
ear--'Please don't go away and leave me--please don't--please stay--'

And as she didn't say anything I kissed her again, and again murmured,
'Please--'

And as she still didn't say anything I murmured, 'Won't you? Say you
will--'

And then I discovered to my horror that why she didn't say anything was
because she was crying.

I have been slow and unimaginative about Mrs. Barnes. Having guessed
that Dolly was a German widow I might so easily have guessed the rest:
the poverty arising out of such a situation, the vexations and
humiliations of the attitude of people in the pensions she has dragged
about in during and since the war,--places in which Dolly's name must
needs be registered and her nationality known; the fatigue and
loneliness of such a life, with no home anywhere at all, forced to
wander and wander, her little set at Dulwich probably repudiating her
because of Dolly; or scolding her, in rare letters, for the folly of
her sacrifice; with nothing to go back, to and nothing to look forward
to, and the memory stabbing her always of the lost glories of that
ordered life at home in her well-found house, with the church bells
ringing on Sundays, and everybody polite, and a respectful
crossing-sweeper at the end of the road.

All her life Mrs. Barnes has been luminously respectable. Her
respectability has been, I gather from things she has said, her one
great treasure. To stand clear and plain before her friends, without a
corner in her actions that needed defending or even explaining, was what
the word happiness meant to her. And now here she is, wandering about in
a kind of hiding. With Dolly. With the beloved, the difficult, the
unexplainable Dolly. Unwelcomed, unwanted, and I daresay quite often
asked by the many pension proprietors who are angrily anti-German to go
somewhere else.

I have been thick-skinned about Mrs. Barnes. I am ashamed. And whether I
have guessed right or wrong she shall keep her secrets. I shall not try
again, however good my silly intentions may seem to me, however much I
may think it would ease our daily intercourse, to blunder in among
things about which she wishes to be silent. When she cried like that
this morning, after a moment of looking at her bewildered and aghast, I
suddenly understood. I knew what I have just been writing as if she had
told me. And I stroked her hand, and tried to pretend I didn't notice
anything, because it was so dreadful to see how she, for her part, was
trying so very hard to pretend she wasn't crying. And I kept on
saying--for indeed I didn't know what to say--'Then you'll stay--how
glad I am--then that's settled--'

And actually I heard myself expressing pleasure at the certainty of my
now hearing Merivale to a finish!

How the interview ended was by my conceiving the brilliant idea of going
away on the pretext of giving an order, and leaving Mrs. Barnes alone in
my room till she should have recovered sufficiently to appear
downstairs.

'I must go and tell Mrs. Antoine something,' I suddenly
said,--'something I've forgotten.' And I hurried away.

For once I had been tactful. Wonderful. I couldn't help feeling pleased
at having been able to think of this solution to the situation. Mrs.
Barnes wouldn't want Dolly to see she had been crying. She would stay up
quietly in my room till her eyes had left off being red, and would then
come down as calm and as ready to set a good example as ever.

Continuing to be tactful, I avoided going into the hall, because in it
was Dolly all by herself, offering me my very first opportunity for the
talk alone with her that I have so long been wanting; but of course I
wouldn't do anything now that might make Mrs. Barnes uneasy; I hope I
never may again.

To avoid the hall, however, meant finding myself in the servants'
quarters. I couldn't take shelter in the kitchen and once more warm
myself, because it was their dinner hour. There remained the back door,
the last refuge of a hostess. It was open; and outside was the yard, the
rain, and Mou-Mou's kennel looming through the mist.

I went and stood in the door, contemplating what I saw, waiting till I
thought Mrs. Barnes would have had time to be able to come out of my
bedroom. I knew she would stay there till her eyes were ready to face
the world again, so I knew I must have patience. Therefore I stood in
the door and contemplated what I saw from it, while I sought patience
and ensued it. But it is astonishing how cold and penetrating these wet
mountain mists are. They seem to get right through one's body into
one's very spirit, and make it cold too, and doubtful of the future.


_September 4th._

Dolly looked worried, I thought, yesterday when Mrs. Barnes, as rocky
and apparently arid as ever--but I knew better--told her at tea-time in
my presence that I had invited them to stay on as long as I did.

There were fortunately few expressions of gratitude this time decorating
Mrs. Barnes's announcement. I think she still wasn't quite sure enough
of herself to be anything but brief. Dolly looked quickly at me, without
her usual smile. I said what a great pleasure it was to know they
weren't going away. 'You do like staying, don't you, Dolly?' I asked,
breaking off suddenly in my speech, for her serious eyes were not the
eyes of the particularly pleased.

She said she did; of course she did; and added the proper politenesses.
But she went on looking thoughtful, and I believe she wants to tell me,
or have me told by Mrs. Barnes, about Siegfried. I think she thinks I
ought to know what sort of guest I've got before deciding whether I
really want her here any longer or not.

I wish I could somehow convey to Dolly, without upsetting Mrs. Barnes,
that I do know and don't mind. I tried to smile reassuringly at her, but
the more I smiled the more serious she grew.

As for Mrs. Barnes, there is now between her and me the shyness, the
affection, of a secret understanding. She may look as arid and stiff as
she likes, but we have kissed each other with real affection and I have
felt her arm tighten round my neck. How much more enlightening, how much
more efficacious than any words, than any explanations, is that very
simple thing, a kiss. I believe if we all talked less and kissed more we
should arrive far quicker at comprehension. I give this opinion with
diffidence. It is rather a conjecture than an opinion. I have not found
it shared in literature--in conversation I would omit it--except once,
and then by a German. He wrote a poem whose first line was:

     _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.'

'Dear Dolly,' I murmured, 'don't please make my blood run cold--'

'Ah, but it's forbidden in the Prayer Book.'

'What is?'

'What I did.'

'_What_ did you do, Dolly?' I asked, now thoroughly uneasy; had her
recklessness gone so far as to lead her to tamper with the Commandments?

Dolly tore off currants and leaves in handfuls and flung them together
into the basket. 'I married my uncle,' she said.

'What?' I said, really astonished.

'Karl--that was my second husband--was Siegfried's--that was my first
husband's--uncle. He was Siegfried's mother's brother--my first
mother-in-law's brother. My second mother-in-law was my first husband's
grandmother. In Germany you can. In Germany you do. But it's forbidden
in the English Prayer Book. It's put in the Table of Kindred and
Affinity that you mustn't. It's number nine of the right-hand
column--Husband's Mother's Brother. And Kitty well, you can guess what
Kitty has felt about it. If it had been my own uncle, my own mother's
brother, she couldn't have been more horrified and heartbroken. I didn't
realise. I didn't think of the effect it might have on them at home. I
just did it. They didn't know till I had done it. I always think it
saves bother to marry first and tell afterwards. I had been so many
years in Germany. It seemed quite natural. I simply stayed on in the
family. It was really habit.'

She threw some currants into the basket, then faced me. 'There,' she
said, looking me straight in the eyes, 'I've told you, and if you think
me impossible I'll go.'

'But--' I began.

Her face was definitely flushed now, and her eyes very bright.

'Oh, I'd be sorry, sorry,' she said impetuously, 'if this ended _us_!'

'Us?'

'You and me. But I couldn't stay here and not tell you, could I. Just
because you may hate it so I had to tell you. You've got a dean in your
family. The Prayer Book is in your blood. And if you do hate it I shall
understand perfectly, and I'll go away and take Kitty and you need never
see or hear of me again, so you musn't mind saying--'

'Oh do wait a minute!' I cried. 'I don't hate it. I don't mind. I'd only
hate it and mind if it was I who had to marry a German uncle. I can't
imagine why anybody should ever want to marry uncles anyhow, but if they
do, and they're not blood-uncles, and it's the custom of the country,
why not? You'll stay here, Dolly. I won't let you go. I don't care if
you've married fifty German uncles. I've loved you from the moment I
saw you on the top of the wall in your funny petticoat. Why, you don't
suppose,' I finished, suddenly magnificently British, 'that I'm going to
let any mere _German_ come between you and me?'

Whereupon we kissed each other,--not once, but several times; fell,
indeed, upon each other's necks. And Antoine, coming to fetch the red
currants for Lisette who had been making signs to him from the steps for
some time past, stood waiting quietly till we should have done.

When he thought we had done he stepped forward and said, '_Pardon,
mesdames_'--and stooping down deftly extracted the basket from between
us.

As he did so his eye rested an instant on the stripped and broken
branches of the currant bush.

He wasn't surprised.


_September 7th._

I couldn't finish about yesterday last night. When I had got as far as
Antoine and the basket I looked at the little clock on my writing-table
and saw to my horror that it was nearly twelve. So I fled into bed; for
what would Mrs. Barnes have said if she had seen me burning the
electric light and doing what she calls trying my eyes at such an hour?
It doesn't matter that they are my eyes and my light: Mrs. Barnes has
become, by virtue of her troubles, the secret standard of my behaviour.
She is like the eye of God to me now,--in every place. And my desire to
please her and make her happy has increased a hundredfold since Dolly
and I have at last, in spite of her precautions, become real friends.

We decided before we left the kitchen-garden yesterday that this was the
important thing: to keep Mrs. Barnes from any hurt that we can avoid.
She has had so many. She will have so many more. I understand now
Dolly's deep sense of all her poor Kitty has given up and endured for
her sake, and I understand the shackles these sacrifices have put on
Dolly. It is a terrible burden to be very much loved. If Dolly were of a
less naturally serene temperament she would go under beneath the weight,
she would be, after five years of it, a colourless, meek thing.

We agreed that Mrs. Barnes musn't know that I know about Dolly's
marriages. Dolly said roundly that it would kill her. Mrs. Barnes
regards her misguided sister as having committed a crime. It is
forbidden in the Prayer Book. She brushes aside the possible Prayer
Books of other countries. Therefore the word German shall never I hope
again escape me while she is here, nor will I talk of husbands, and
perhaps it will be as well to avoid mentioning uncles. Dear me, how very
watchful I shall have to be. For the first time in his life the Dean has
become unmentionable.

I am writing this before breakfast. I haven't seen Dolly alone again
since the kitchen-garden. I don't know how she contrived to appease Mrs.
Barnes and explain her long absence, but that she did contrive it was
evident from the harmonious picture I beheld when, half an hour later, I
too went back to the house. They were sitting together in the sun just
outside the front door knitting. Mrs. Barnes's face was quite contented.
Dolly looked specially radiant. I believe she is made up entirely of
love and laughter--dangerous, endearing ingredients! We just looked at
each other as I came out of the house. It is the most comforting, the
warmest thing, this unexpected finding of a completely understanding
friend.


_September 10th._

Once you have achieved complete understanding with anybody it isn't
necessary, I know, to talk much. I have been told this by the wise.
They have said mere knowledge that the understanding is there is enough.
They have said that perfect understanding needs no expression, that the
perfect intercourse is without words. That may be; but I want to talk.
Not excessively, but sometimes. Speech does add grace and satisfaction
to friendship. It may not be necessary, but it is very agreeable.

As far as I can see I am never, except by the rarest chance, going to
get an opportunity of talking to Dolly alone. And there are so many
things I want to ask her. Were her experiences all pleasant? Or is it
her gay, indomitable spirit that has left her, after them, so entirely
unmarked? Anyhow the last five years can't possibly have been pleasant,
and yet they've not left the shadow of a stain on her serenity. I feel
that she would think very sanely about anything her bright mind touched.
There is something disinfecting about Dolly. I believe she would
disinfect me of the last dregs of morbidness I still may have lurking
inside me.

She and Mrs. Barnes are utterly poor. When the war began Dolly was in
Germany, she told me that morning in the kitchen-garden, and had been a
widow nearly a year. Not Siegfried's widow: Juchs's. I find her
widowhoods confusing.

'Didn't you ever have a child, Dolly?' I asked.

'No,' she said.

'Then how is it you twitched the handkerchief off your sister's sleeping
face that first day and said Peep bo to her so professionally?'

'I used to do that to Siegfried. We were both quite young to begin with,
and played silly games.'

'I see,' I said. 'Go on.'

Juchs had left her some money; just enough to live on. Siegfried hadn't
ever had any, except what he earned as a clerk in a bank, but Juchs had
had some. She hadn't married Juchs for any reason, I gathered, except to
please him. It did please him very much, she said, and I can quite
imagine it. Siegfried too had been pleased in his day. 'I seem to have a
gift for pleasing Germans,' she remarked, smiling. 'They were both very
kind to me. I ended by being very fond of them both. I believe I'd be
fond of anyone who was kind. There's a good deal of the dog about me.'

Directly the war began she packed up and came to Switzerland; she didn't
wish, under such circumstances, to risk pleasing any more Germans.
Since her marriage to Juchs all her English relations except Kitty had
cast her off, so that only a neutral country was open to her, and Kitty
instantly gave up everybody and everything to come and be with her. At
first her little income was sent to her by her German bank, but after
the first few months it sent no more, and she became entirely dependent
on Kitty. All that Kitty had was what she got from selling her house.
The Germans, Dolly said, would send no money out of the country. Though
the war was over she could get nothing out of them unless she went back.
She would never go back. It would kill Kitty; and she too, she thought,
would very likely die. Her career of pleasing Germans does seem to be
definitely over.

'So you see,' she said smiling, 'how wonderful it is for us to have
found _you_.'

'What I can't get over,' I said, 'is having found _you_.'

But I wish, having found her, I might sometimes talk to her.


_September 12th._

We live here in an atmosphere of _combats de générosité_. It is
tremendous. Mrs. Barnes and I are always doing things we don't want to
do because we suppose it is what is going to make the other one happy.
The tyranny of unselfishness! I can hardly breathe.


_September 19th._

I think it isn't good for women to be shut up too long alone together
without a man. They seem to fester. Even the noblest. Taking our
intentions all round they really are quite noble. We do only want to
develope in ideal directions, and remove what we think are the obstacles
to this development in each other's paths; and yet we fester. Not Dolly.
Nothing ever smudges her equable, clear wholesomeness; but there are
moments when I feel as if Mrs. Barnes and I got much mixed up together
in a sort of sticky mass. Faint struggles from time to time, brief
efforts at extrication, show there is still a life in me that is not
flawlessly benevolent, but I repent of them as soon as made because of
the pain and surprise that instantly appear in Mrs. Barnes's tired,
pathetic eyes, and hastily I engulf myself once more in goodness.

That's why I haven't written lately, not for a whole week. It is
glutinous, the prevailing goodness. I have stuck. I have felt as though
my mind were steeped in treacle. Then to-day I remembered my old age,
and the old lady waiting at the end of the years who will want to be
amused, so I've begun again. I have an idea that what will really most
amuse that old lady, that wrinkled philosophical old thing, will be all
the times when I was being uncomfortable. She will be so very
comfortable herself, so done with everything, so entirely an impartial
looker-on, that the rebellions and contortions and woes of the creature
who used to be herself will only make her laugh. She will be blithe in
her security. Besides, she will know the sequel, she will know what came
next, and will see, I daresay, how vain the expense of trouble and
emotions was. So that naturally she will laugh. 'You _silly_ little
thing!' I can imagine her exclaiming, 'If only you had known how it all
wasn't going to matter!' And she will laugh very heartily; for I am sure
she will be a gay old lady.

But what we really want here now is an occasional breath of
brutality,--the passage, infrequent and not too much prolonged, of a
man. If he came to tea once in a way it would do. He would be a blast of
fresh air. He would be like opening a window. We have minced about among
solicitudes and delicacies so very long. I want to smell the rankness
of a pipe, and see the cushions thrown anyhow. I want to see somebody
who doesn't knit. I want to hear Mrs. Barnes being contradicted.
Especially do I want to hear Mrs. Barnes being contradicted ... oh, I'm
afraid I'm still not very good!


_September 20th._

The grapes are ripe down in the vineyards along the edge of the valley,
and this morning I proposed that we should start off early and spend the
day among them doing a grape-cure.

Mrs. Barnes liked the idea very much, and sandwiches were ordered, for
we were not to come back till evening; then at the last moment she
thought it would be too hot in the valley, and that her head, which has
been aching lately, might get worse. The sandwiches were ready on the
hall table. Dolly and I were ready too, boots on and sticks in hand. To
our great surprise Mrs. Barnes, contemplating the sandwiches, said that
as they had been cut they mustn't be wasted, and therefore we had better
go without her.

We were astonished. We were like children being given a holiday. She
kissed us affectionately when we said goodbye, as though, to mark her
trust in us,--in Dolly that she wouldn't tell me the dreadful truth
about herself, in me that I wouldn't encourage her in undesirable points
of view. How safe we were, how deserving of trust, Mrs. Barnes naturally
didn't know. Nothing that either of us could say could possibly upset
the other.

'If Mrs. Barnes knew the worst, knew I knew everything, wouldn't she be
happier?' I asked Dolly as we went briskly down the mountain. 'Wouldn't
at least part of her daily anxiety be got rid of, her daily fear lest I
_should_ get to know?'

'It would kill her,' said Dolly firmly.

'But surely--'

'You mustn't forget that she thinks what I did was a crime.'

'You mean the uncle.'

'Oh, she wouldn't very much mind your knowing about Siegfried. She would
do her utmost to prevent it, because of her horror of Germans and of the
horror she assumes you have of Germans. But once you did know she would
be resigned. The other--' Dolly shook her head. 'It would kill her,' she
said again.

We came to a green slope starred thick with autumn crocuses, and sat
down to look at them. These delicate, lovely things have been appearing
lately on the mountain, at first one by one and then in flocks,--pale
cups of light, lilac on long white stalks that snap off at a touch. Like
the almond trees in the suburban gardens round London that flower when
the winds are cruellest, the autumn crocuses seem too frail to face the
cold nights we are having now; yet it is just when conditions are
growing unkind that they come out. There they are, all over the mountain
fields, flowering in greater profusion the further the month moves
towards winter.

This particular field of them was so beautiful that with one accord
Dolly and I sat down to look. One doesn't pass such beauty by. I think
we sat quite half an hour drinking in those crocuses, and their sunny
plateau, and the way the tops of the pine trees on the slope below stood
out against the blue emptiness of the valley. We were most content. The
sun was so warm, the air of such an extraordinary fresh purity. Just to
breathe was happiness. I think that in my life I have been most blest in
this, that so often just to breathe has been happiness.

Dolly and I, now that we could talk as much as we wanted to, didn't
after all talk much. Suddenly I felt incurious about her Germans. I
didn't want them among the crocuses. The past, both hers and mine,
seemed to matter very little, seemed a stuffy, indifferent thing, in
that clear present. I don't suppose if we hadn't brought an empty basket
with us on purpose to take back grapes to Mrs. Barnes that we would have
gone on down to the vineyards at all, but rather have spent the day just
where we were. The basket, however, had to be filled; it had to be
brought back filled. It was to be the proof that we had done what we
said we would. Kitty, said Dolly, would be fidgeted if we hadn't carried
out the original plan, and might be afraid that, if we weren't eating
grapes all day as arranged, we were probably using our idle mouths for
saying things she wished left unsaid.

'Does poor Kitty _always_ fidget?' I asked.

'Always,' said Dolly.

'About every single thing that might happen?'

'Every single thing,' said Dolly. 'She spends her life now entirely in
fear--and it's all because of me.'

'But really, while she is with me she could have a holiday from fear if
we told her I knew about your uncle and had accepted it with calm.'

'It would kill her,' said Dolly once more, firmly.

We lunched in the vineyards, and our desert was grapes. We ate them for
a long while with enthusiasm, and went on eating them through every
degree of declining pleasure till we disliked them. For fifty centimes
each the owner gave us permission to eat grapes till we died if we
wished to. For another franc we were allowed to fill the basket for Mrs.
Barnes. Only conscientiousness made us fill it full, for we couldn't
believe anybody would really want to eat such things as grapes. Then we
began to crawl up the mountain again, greatly burdened both inside and
out.

It took us over three hours to get home. We carried the basket in turns,
half an hour at a time; but what about those other, invisible, grapes,
that came with us as well? I think people who have been doing a
grape-cure should sit quiet for the rest of the day, or else walk only
on the level. To have to take one's cure up five thousand feet with one
is hard. Again we didn't talk; this time because we couldn't. All that
we could do was to pant and to perspire.

It was a brilliant afternoon, and the way led up when the vineyards left
off through stunted fir trees that gave no shade, along narrow paths
strewn with dry fir needles,--the slipperiest things in the world to
walk on. Through these hot, shadeless trees the sun beat on our bent and
burdened figures. Whenever we stopped to rest and caught sight of each
other's flushed wet faces we laughed.

'Kitty needn't have been afraid we'd _say_ much,' panted Dolly in one of
these pauses, her eyes screwed up with laughter at my melted state.

I knew what I must be looking like by looking at her.

It was five o'clock by the time we reached the field with the crocuses,
and we sank down on the grass where we had sat in the morning,
speechless, dripping, overwhelmed by grapes. For a long while we said
nothing. It was bliss to lie in the cool grass and not to have to carry
anything. The sun, low in the sky, slanted almost level along the field,
and shining right through the thin-petalled crocuses made of each a
little star. I don't know anything more happy than to be where it is
beautiful with some one who sees and loves it as much as you do
yourself. We lay stretched out on the grass, quite silent, watching the
splendour grow and grow till, having reached a supreme moment of
radiance, it suddenly went out. The sun dropped behind the mountains
along to the west, and out went the light; with a flick; in an instant.
And the crocuses, left standing in their drab field, looked like so many
blown-out candles.

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 in 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 Antoine, 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.

'You're sure those grape-stones--?' she began anxiously.

'Oh, certain!' I cried; and hastily became meek.


_September 27th._

Oaths, now. I shrink from so much as suggesting it, but there _is_
something to be said for them. They're so brief. They get the mood over.
They clear the air. Women explain and protest and tiptoe tactfully about
among what they think are your feelings, and there's no end to it. And
then, if they're good women, good, affectionate, unselfish women, they
have a way of forgiving you. They keep on forgiving you. Freely. With a
horrible magnanimousness. Mrs. Barnes insisted on forgiving me
yesterday for the cigarettes, for the untidiness. It isn't a happy
thing, I think, to be shut up in a small lonely house being forgiven.


_September 28th._

In the night the wind shook the windows and the rain pelted against
them, and I knew that when I went down to breakfast the struggle with
Mrs. Barnes would begin.

It did. It began directly after breakfast in the hall, where Antoine,
remarking firmly '_C'est l'hiver_,' had lit a roaring fire, determined
this time to stand no parsimonious nonsense, and it has gone on all day,
with the necessary intervals for recuperation.

Nothing has been settled. I still don't in the least know what to do.
Mrs. Barnes's attitude is obstinately unselfish. She and Dolly, she
reiterates, won't dream of staying on here unless they feel that by
doing so they could be of service to me by keeping me company. If I'm
not here I can't be kept company with; that, she says, I must admit.

I do. Every time she says it--it has been a day of reiterations--I admit
it. Therefore, if I go they go, she finishes with a kind of sombre
triumph at her determination not to give trouble or be an expense; but
words fail her, she adds, (this is a delusion,) to express her gratitude
for my offer, etc., and never, for the rest of their lives, will she and
Dolly forget the delightful etc., etc.

What am I to do? I don't know. How lightly one embarks on marriage and
on guests, and in what unexpected directions do both develope! Also,
what a terrible thing is unselfishness. Once it has become a habit, how
tough, how difficult to uproot. A single obstinately unselfish person
can wreck the happiness of a whole household. Is it possible that I
shall have to stay here? And I have so many things waiting for me in
England that have to be done.

There's a fire in my bedroom, and I've been sitting on the floor staring
into it for the past hour, seeking a solution. Because all the while
Mrs. Barnes is firmly refusing to listen for a moment to my entreaties
to use the house while I'm away, her thin face is hungry with longing to
accept, and the mere talking, however bravely, of taking up the old
homeless wandering again fills her tired eyes with tears.

Once I got so desperate that I begged her to stay as a kindness to me,
in order to keep an eye on those patently efficient and trustworthy
Antoines. This indeed was the straw-clutching of the drowning, and even
Mrs. Barnes, that rare smiler, smiled.

No. I don't know what to do. How the wind screams. I'll go to bed.


_September 29th._

And there's nothing to be done with Dolly either.

'You told me you put your foot down sometimes,' I said, appealing to her
this morning in one of Mrs. Barnes's brief absences, 'Why don't you put
it down now?'

'Because I don't want to,' said Dolly.

'But _why_ not?' I asked, exasperated. 'It's so reasonable what I
suggest, so easy--'

'I don't want to stay here without you,' said Dolly. 'This place _is_
you. You've made it. It is soaked in you. I should feel haunted here
without you. Why, I should feel lost.'

'As though you would! When we hardly speak to each other as it is--'

'But I watch you,' said Dolly, smiling, 'and I know what you're
thinking. You've no idea how what you're thinking comes out on your
face.'

'But if it makes your unhappy sister's mind more comfortable? If she
feels free from anxiety here? If she feels you are safe here?' I
passionately reasoned.

'I don't want to be safe.'

'Oh Dolly--you're not going to break out again?' I asked, as anxiously
every bit as poor Mrs. Barnes would have asked.

Dolly laughed. 'I'll never do anything again that makes Kitty unhappy,'
she said. 'But I do like the feeling--' she made a movement with her
arms as though they were wings--'oh, I _like_ the feeling of having
room!'


_September 30th._

The weather is better again, and there has been a pause in our
strivings. Mrs. Barnes and I have drifted, tired both of us, I resting
in that refuge of the weak, the putting off of making up my mind, back
into talking only of the situation and the view. If Mrs. Barnes were
either less good or more intelligent! But the combination of
non-intelligence with goodness is unassailable. You can't get through.
Nothing gets through. You give in. You are flattened out. You become a
slave. And your case is indeed hopeless if the non-intelligent and
good, are at the same time the victims, nobly enduring, of undeserved
misfortune.


_Evening._

A really remarkable thing happened to-day: I've had a prayer answered. I
shall never dare pray again. I prayed for a man, any man, to come and
leaven us, and I've got him.

Let me set it down in order.

This afternoon on our walk, soon after we had left the house and were
struggling along against gusts of wind and whirling leaves in the
direction, as it happened, of the carriage road up from the valley,
Dolly said, 'Who is that funny little man coming towards us?'

And I looked, and said after a moment in which my heart stood still--for
what had _he_ come for?--'That funny little man is my uncle.'

There he was, the authentic uncle: gaiters, apron, shovel hat. He was
holding on his hat, and the rude wind, thwarted in its desire to frolic
with it, frisked instead about his apron, twitching it up, bellying it
out; so that his remaining hand had all it could do to smooth the apron
down again decorously, and he was obliged to carry his umbrella pressed
tightly against his side under his arm.

'Not your uncle the Dean?' asked Mrs. Barnes in a voice of awe, hastily
arranging her toque; for a whiff of the Church, any whiff, even one so
faint as a curate, is as the breath of life to her.

'Yes,' I said, amazed and helpless. 'My Uncle Rudolph.'

'Why, he might be a German,' said Dolly, 'with a name like that.'

'Oh, but don't say so to him!' I cried. 'He has a perfect _horror_ of
Germans--'

And it was out before I remembered, before I could stop it. Good
heavens, I thought; good heavens.

I looked sideways at Mrs. Barnes. She was, I am afraid, very red. So I
plunged in again, eager to reassure her. 'That is to say,' I said, 'he
used to have during the war. But of course now that the war is over it
would be mere silliness--nobody minds now--nobody _ought_ to mind now--'

My voice, however, trailed out into silence, for I knew, and Mrs. Barnes
knew, that people do mind.

By this time we were within hail of my uncle, and with that joy one
instinctively assumes on such occasions I waved my stick in exultant
circles at him and called out, 'How very delightful of you, Uncle
Rudolph!' And I advanced to greet him, the others tactfully dropping
behind, alone.

There on the mountain side, with the rude wind whisking his clothes
irreverently about, we kissed; and in my uncle's kiss I instantly
perceived something of the quality of Mrs. Barnes's speeches the day I
smoked the twelve cigarettes,--he was forgiving me.

'I have come to escort you home to England,' he said, his face spread
over with the spirit of allowing byegones to be byegones; and in that
spirit he let go of his apron in order reassuringly to pat my shoulder.

Immediately the apron bellied. His hand had abruptly to leave my
shoulder so as to clutch it down again. 'You are with ladies?' he said a
little distractedly, holding on to this turbulent portion of his
clothing.

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph,' I replied modestly. 'I hope you didn't expect to
find me with gentlemen?'

'I expected to find you, dear child, as I have always found you,--ready
to admit and retrace. Generously ready to admit and retrace.'

'Sweet of you,' I murmured. 'But you should have let me know you were
coming. I'd have had things killed for you. Fatted things.'

'It is not I,' he said, in as gentle a voice as he could manage, the
wind being what it was, 'who am the returning prodigal. Indeed I wish
for your sake that I were. My shoulders could bear the burden better
than those little ones of yours.'

This talk was ominous, so I said, 'I must introduce you to Mrs. Barnes
and her sister Mrs. Jewks. Let me present,' I said ceremoniously,
turning to them who were now fortunately near enough, 'my Uncle Rudolph
to you, of whom you have often heard me speak.'

'Indeed we have,' said Mrs. Barnes, with as extreme a cordiality as awe
permitted.

My uncle, obviously relieved to find his niece not eccentrically alone
but flanked by figures so respectable, securely, as it were, embedded in
widows, was very gracious. Mrs. Barnes received his pleasant speeches
with delighted reverence; and as we went back to the house, for the
first thing to do with arrivals from England is to give them a bath, he
and she fell naturally into each other's company along the narrow track,
and Dolly and I followed behind.

We looked at each other, simultaneously perceiving the advantages of
four rather than of three. Behind Mrs. Barnes's absorbed and obsequious
back we looked at each other with visions in our eyes of unsupervised
talks opening before us.

'They have their uses, you see,' I said in a low voice,--not that I need
have lowered it in that wind.

'Deans have,' agreed Dolly, nodding.

And my desire to laugh,--discreetly, under my breath, ready to pull my
face sober and be gazing at the clouds the minute our relations should
turn round, was strangled by the chill conviction that my uncle's coming
means painful things for me.

He is going to talk to me; talk about what I am trying so hard not to
think of, what I really am succeeding in not thinking of; and he is
going to approach the desolating subject in, as he will say and perhaps
even persuade himself to believe, a Christian spirit, but in what really
is a spirit of sheer worldliness. He has well-founded hopes of soon
going to be a bishop. I am his niece. The womenkind of bishops should be
inconspicuous, should see to it that comment cannot touch them.
Therefore he is going to try to get me to deliver myself up to a life
of impossible wretchedness again, only that the outside of it may look
in order. The outside of the house,--of the house of a bishop's
niece,--at all costs keep it neat, keep it looking like all the others
in the street; so shall nobody know what is going on inside, and the
neighbours won't talk about one's uncle.

If I were no relation but just a mere ordinary stranger-soul in
difficulties, he, this very same man, would be full of understanding,
would find himself unable, indeed, the facts being what they are, to be
anything but most earnestly concerned to help me keep clear of all
temptations to do what he calls retrace. And at the same time he would
be concerned also to strengthen me in that mood which is I am sure the
right one, and does very often recur, of being entirely without
resentment and so glad to have the remembrance at least of the beautiful
things I believed in. But I am his niece. He is about to become a
bishop. Naturally he has to be careful not to be too much like Christ.

Accordingly I followed uneasily in his footsteps towards the house,
dreading what was going to happen next. And nothing has happened next.
Not yet, anyhow. I expect to-morrow....

We spent a most bland evening. I'm as sleepy and as much satiated by
ecclesiastical good things as though I had been the whole day in church.
My uncle, washed, shaven, and restored by tea, laid himself out to
entertain. He was the decorous life of the party. He let himself go to
that tempered exuberance with which good men of his calling like to
prove that they really are not so very much different from other people
after all. Round the hall fire we sat after tea, and again after supper,
Dolly and I facing each other at the corners, my uncle and Mrs. Barnes
in the middle, and the room gently echoed with seemly and strictly
wholesome mirth. 'How enjoyable,' my uncle seemed to say, looking at us
at the end of each of his good stories, gathering in the harvest of our
appreciation, 'how enjoyable is the indulgence of legitimate fun. Why
need one ever indulge in illegitimacy?'

And indeed his stories were so very good that every one of them, before
they reached the point of bringing forth their joke, must have been to
church and got married.

Dolly sat knitting, the light shining on her infantile fair hair, her
eyes downcast in a dove-like meekness. Punctually her dimple flickered
out at the right moment in each anecdote. She appeared to know by
instinct where to smile; and several times I was only aware that the
moment had come by happening to notice her dimple.

As for Mrs. Barnes, for the first time since I have known her, her face
was cloudless. My uncle, embarked on anecdote, did not mention the war.
We did not once get on to Germans. Mrs. Barnes could give herself up to
real enjoyment. She beamed. She was suffused with reverential delight.
And her whole body, the very way she sat in her chair, showed an
absorption, an eagerness not to miss a crumb of my uncle's talk, that
would have been very gratifying to him if he were not used to just this.
It is strange how widows cling to clergymen. Ever since I can remember,
like the afflicted Margaret's apprehensions in Wordsworth's poem, they
have come to Uncle Rudolph in crowds. My aunt used to raise her eyebrows
and ask me if I could at all tell her what they saw in him.

When we bade each other goodnight there was something in Mrs. Barnes's
manner to me that showed me the presence of a man was already doing its
work. She was aerated. Fresh, air had got into her and was circulating
freely. At my bedroom door she embraced me with warm and simple
heartiness, without the usual painful search of my face to see if by any
chance there was anything she had left undone in her duty of being
unselfish. My uncle's arrival has got her thoughts off me for a bit. I
knew that what we wanted was a man. Not that a dean is quite my idea of
a man, but then on the other hand neither is he quite my idea of a
woman, and his arrival does put an end for the moment to Mrs. Barnes's
and my dreadful _combats de générosité_. He infuses fresh blood into our
anaemic little circle. Different blood, perhaps I should rather say; the
blood of deans not being, I think, ever very fresh.

'Good night, Uncle Rudolph,' I said, getting up at ten o'clock and
holding up my face to him. 'We have to thank you for a delightful
evening.'

'Most delightful,' echoed Mrs. Barnes enthusiastically, getting up too
and rolling up her knitting.

My uncle was gratified. He felt he had been at his best, and that his
best had been appreciated.

'Good night, dear child,' he said, kissing my offered cheek. 'May the
blessed angels watch about your bed.'

'Thank you, Uncle Rudolph,' I said, bowing my head beneath this
benediction.

Mrs. Barnes looked on at the little domestic scene with reverential
sympathy. Then her turn came.

'_Good_ night, Mrs. Barnes,' said my uncle most graciously, shaking
hands and doing what my dancing mistress used to call bending from the
waist.

And to Dolly, '_Good_ night, Miss--'

Then he hesitated, groping for the name. 'Mrs.,' said Dolly, sweetly
correcting him, her hand in his.

'Ah, I beg your pardon. Married. These introductions--especially in that
noisy wind.'

'No--not exactly married,' said Dolly, still sweetly correcting him, her
hand still in his.

'Not exactly--?'

'My sister has lost her--my sister is a widow,' said Mrs. Barnes hastily
and nervously; alas, these complications of Dolly's!

'Indeed. Indeed. Sad, sad,' said my uncle sympathetically, continuing to
hold her hand. 'And so young. Ah. Yes. Well, good night then, Mrs--'

But again he had to pause and grope.

'Jewks,' said Dolly sweetly.

'Forgive me. You may depend I shall not again be so stupid. Good night.
And may the blessed angels--'

A third time he stopped; pulled up, I suppose, by the thought that it
was perhaps not quite seemly to draw the attention of even the angels to
an unrelated lady's bed. So he merely very warmly shook her hand, while
she smiled a really heavenly smile at him.

We left him standing with his back to the fire watching us go up the
stairs, holding almost tenderly, for one must expend one's sympathy on
something, a glass of hot water.

My uncle is very sympathetic. In matters that do not touch his own
advancement he is all sympathy. That is why widows like him, I expect.
My aunt would have known the reason if she hadn't been his wife.


_October 1st._

While I dress it is my habit to read. Some book is propped up open
against the looking-glass, and sometimes, for one's eyes can't be
everywhere at once, my hooks in consequence don't get quite
satisfactorily fastened. Indeed I would be very neat if I could, but
there are other things. This morning the book was the Bible, and in it
I read, _A prudent man_--how much more prudently, then, a
woman--_foreseeth the evil and hideth himself, but the simple pass on
and are punished._

This made me late for breakfast. I sat looking out of the window, my
hands in my lap, the sensible words of Solomon ringing in my ears, and
considered if there was any way of escaping the fate of the simple.

There was no way. It seemed hard that without being exactly of the
simple I yet should be doomed to their fate. And outside it was one of
those cold windy mornings when male relations insist on taking one for
what they call a run--as if one were a dog--in order to go through the
bleak process they describe as getting one's cobwebs blown off. I can't
bear being parted from my cobwebs. I never want them blown off. Uncle
Rudolph is small and active, besides having since my aunt's death
considerably dwindled beneath his apron, and I felt sure he intended to
run me up the mountain after breakfast, and, having got me breathless
and speechless on to some cold rock, sit with me there and say all the
things I am dreading having to hear.

It was quite difficult to get myself to go downstairs. I seemed rooted.
I knew that, seeing that I am that unfortunately situated person the
hostess, my duty lay in morning smiles behind the coffee pot; but the
conviction of what was going to happen to me after the coffee pot kept
me rooted, even when the bell had rung twice.

When, however, after the second ringing quick footsteps pattered along
the passage to my door I did get up,--jumped up, afraid of what might be
coming-in. Bedrooms are no real protection from uncles. Those quick
footsteps might easily be Uncle Rudolph's. I hurried across to the door
and pulled it open, so that at least by coming out I might stop his
coming in; and there was Mrs. Antoine, her hand lifted up to knock.

'_Ces dames et Monsieur l'Evêque attendent,_' she said, with an air of
reproachful surprise.

'_Il n'est pas un évêque_,' I replied a little irritably, for I knew I
was in the wrong staying upstairs like that, and naturally resented not
being allowed to be in the wrong in peace. '_Il est seulement presque
un_.'

Mrs. Antoine said nothing to that, but stepping aside to let me pass
informed me rather severely that the coffee had been on the table a
whole quarter of an hour.

'_Comment appelle-t-on chez vous_,' I said, lingering in the doorway to
gain time, '_ce qui vient devant un évêque?_'

'_Ce qui vient devant un évêque?_' repeated Mrs. Antoine doubtfully.

'_Oui. L'espèce de monsieur qui n'est pas tout à fait évêque mais
presque?_'

Mrs. Antoine knit her brows. '_Ma foi--_' she began.

'_Oh, j'ai oublié_,' I said. '_Vous n'êtes plus catholique. Il n'y a
rien comme des évêques et comme les messieurs qui sont presque évêques
dans votre église protestante, n'est-ce pas?_'

'_Mais rien, rien, rien_,' asseverated Mrs. Antoine vehemently, her
hands spread out, her shoulders up to her ears, passionately protesting
the empty purity of her adopted church,--'_mais rien du tout, du tout.
Madame peut venir un dimanche voir...._'

Then, having cleared off these imputations, she switched back to the
coffee. '_Le café--Madame désire que j'en fasse encore? Ces dames et
Monsieur l'Evêque--_'

'_Il n'est pas un év--_'

'Ah--here you are!' exclaimed my uncle, his head appearing at the top of
the stairs. 'I was just coming to see if there was anything the matter.
Here she is--coming, coming!' he called out genially to the others; and
on my hurrying to join him, for I am not one to struggle against the
inevitable, he put his arm through mine and we went down together.

Having got me to the bottom he placed both hands on my shoulders and
twisted me round to the light. 'Dear child,' he said, scrutinizing my
face while he held me firmly in this position, 'we were getting quite
anxious about you. Mrs. Barnes feared you might be ill, and was already
contemplating remedies--' I shuddered--'however--' he twisted me round
to Mrs. Barnes--'nothing ill about this little lady, Mrs. Barnes, eh?'

Then he took my chin between his finger and thumb and kissed me lightly,
gaily even, on each cheek, and then, letting me go, he rubbed his hands
and briskly approached the table, all the warm things on which were
swathed as usual when I am late either in napkins or in portions of Mrs.
Barnes's clothing.

'Come along--come along, now,--breakfast, breakfast,' cried my uncle.
'_For these and all Thy mercies Lord_--' he continued with hardly a
break, his eyes shut, his hands outspread over Mrs. Barnes's white
woollen shawl in benediction.

We were overwhelmed. The male had arrived and taken us in hand. But we
were happily overwhelmed, judging from Mrs. Barnes's face. For the first
time since she has been with me the blessing of heaven had been implored
and presumably obtained for her egg, and I realised from her expression
as she ate it how much she had felt the daily enforced consumption,
owing to my graceless habits, of eggs unsanctified. And Dolly too looked
pleased, as she always does when her poor Kitty is happy. I alone
wasn't. Behind the coffee pot I sat pensive. I knew too well what was
before me. I distrusted my uncle's gaiety. He had thought it all out in
the night, and had decided that the best line of approach to the painful
subject he had come to discuss would be one of cheerful affection.
Certainly I had never seen him in such spirits; but then I haven't seen
him since my aunt's death.

'Dear child,' he said, when the table had been picked up and carried off
bodily by the Antoines from our midst, leaving us sitting round nothing
with the surprised feeling of sudden nakedness that, as I have already
explained, this way of clearing away produces--my uncle was actually
surprised for a moment into silence,--'dear child, I would like to take
you for a little run before lunch.'

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph?'

'That we may get rid of our cobwebs.'

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph.'

'I know you are a quick-limbed little lady--'

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph?'

'So you shall take the edge off my appetite for exercise.'

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph.'

'Then perhaps this afternoon one or other of these ladies--' I noted his
caution in not suggesting both.

'Oh, delightful,' Mrs. Barnes hastened to assure him. 'We shall be only
too pleased to accompany you. We are great walkers. We think a very
great deal of the benefits to be derived from regular exercise. Our
father brought us up to a keen appreciation of its necessity. If it were
not that we so strongly feel that the greater part of each day should be
employed in some useful pursuit, we would spend it, I believe, almost
altogether in outdoor exercise.'

'Why not go with my uncle this morning, then?' I asked, catching at a
straw. 'I've got to order dinner--'

'Oh no, no--not on _any_ account. The Dean's wishes--'

But who should pass through the hall at that moment, making for the
small room where I settle my household affairs, his arms full of the
monthly books, but Antoine. It is the first of October. Pay day. I had
forgotten. And for this one morning, at least, I knew that I was saved.

'Look,' I said to Mrs. Barnes, nodding in the direction of Antoine and
his burden.

I felt certain she would have all the appreciation of the solemnity, the
undeferability, of settling up that is characteristic of the virtuous
poor; she would understand that even the wishes of deans must come
second to this holy household rite.

'Oh, how unfortunate!' she exclaimed. 'Just this day of all days--your
uncle's first day.'

But there was nothing to be done. She saw that. And besides, never was a
woman so obstinately determined as I was to do my duty.

'Dear Uncle Rudolph,' I said very amiably--I did suddenly feel very
amiable--'I'm so sorry. This is the one day in the month when I am
tethered. _Any_ other day--'

And I withdrew with every appearance of reluctant but indomitable virtue
into my little room and stayed there shut in safe till I heard them go
out.

From the window I could see them presently starting off up the mountain,
actively led by my uncle who hadn't succeeded in taking only one, Mrs.
Barnes following with the devoutness--she who in our walks goes always
first and chooses the way--of an obedient hen, and some way behind, as
though she disliked having to shed her cobwebs as much as I do,
straggled Dolly. Then, when they had dwindled into just black specks
away up the slope, I turned with lively pleasure to paying the books.

Those blessed books! If only I could have gone on paying them over and
over again, paying them all day! But when I had done them, and conversed
about the hens and bees and cow with Antoine, and it was getting near
lunch-time, and at any moment through the window I might see the three
specks that had dwindled appearing as three specks that were swelling, I
thought I noticed I had a headache.

Addings-up often give me a headache, especially when they won't, which
they curiously often won't, add up the same twice running, so that it
was quite likely that I _had_ got a headache. I sat waiting to be quite
sure, and presently, just as the three tiny specks appeared on the sky
line, I was quite sure; and I came up here and put myself to bed. For, I
argued, it isn't grape-stones this time, it's sums, and Mrs. Barnes
can't dose me for what is only arithmetic; also, even if Uncle Rudolph
insists on coming to my bedside he can't be so inhumane as to torment
somebody who isn't very well.

So here I have been ever since snugly in bed, and I must say my guests
have been most considerate. They have left me almost altogether alone.
Mrs. Barnes did look in once, and when I said, closing my eyes, 'It's
those tradesmens' books--' she understood immediately, and simply nodded
her head and disappeared.

Dolly came and sat with me for a little, but we hadn't said much before
Mrs. Antoine brought a message from my uncle asking her to go down to
tea.

'What are you all doing?' I asked.

'Oh, just sitting round the fire not talking,' she said, smiling.

'_Not_ talking?' I said, surprised.

But she was gone.

Perhaps, I thought, they're not talking for fear of disturbing me. This
really was most considerate.

As for Uncle Rudolph, he hasn't even tried to come and see me. The only
sign of life he has made was to send me the current number of the
_Nineteenth Century_ he brought out with him, in which he has an
article,--a very good one. Else he too has been quite quiet; and I have
read, and I have pondered, and I have written this, and now it really is
bedtime and I'm going to sleep.

Well, a whole day has been gained anyhow, and I have had hours and hours
of complete peace. Rather a surprising lot of peace, really. It _is_
rather surprising, I think. I mean, that they haven't wanted to come and
see me more. Nobody has even been to say goodnight to me. I think I like
being said goodnight to. Especially if nobody does say it.


_October 2nd._

Twenty-four hours sometimes produce remarkable changes. These have.

Again it is night, and again I'm in my room on my way to going to sleep;
but before I get any sleepier I'll write what I can about to-day,
because it has been an extremely interesting day. I knew that what we
wanted was a man.

At breakfast, to which I proceeded punctually, refreshed by my retreat
yesterday, armed from head to foot in all the considerations I had
collected during those quiet hours most likely to make me immune from
Uncle Rudolph's inevitable attacks, having said my prayers and emptied
my mind of weakening memories, I found my three guests silent. Uncle
Rudolph's talkativeness, so conspicuous at yesterday's breakfast, was
confined at to-day's to saying grace. Except for that, he didn't talk at
all. And neither, once having said her Amen, did Mrs. Barnes. Neither
did Dolly, but then she never does.

'I've not got a headache,' I gently said at last, looking round at them.

Perhaps they were still going on being considerate, I thought. At least,
perhaps Mrs. Barnes was. My uncle's silence was merely ominous of what I
was in for, of how strongly, after another night's thinking it out, he
felt about my affairs and his own lamentable connection with them owing
to God's having given me to him for a niece. But Mrs. Barnes--why didn't
_she_ talk? She couldn't surely intend, because once I had a headache,
to go on tiptoe for the rest of our days together?

Nobody having taken any notice of my first announcement I presently
said, 'I'm very well indeed, thank you, this morning.'

At this Dolly laughed, and her eyes sent little morning kisses across to
me. She, at least, was in her normal state.

'Aren't you--' I looked at the other two unresponsive breakfasting
heads--'aren't you glad?'

'Very,' said Mrs. Barnes. 'Very.' But she didn't raise her eyes from her
egg, and my uncle again took no notice.

So then I thought I might as well not take any notice either, and I ate
my breakfast in dignity and retirement, occasionally fortifying myself
against what awaited me after it by looking at Dolly's restful and
refreshing face.

Such an unclouded face; so sweet, so clean, so sunny with morning
graciousness. Really an ideal breakfast-table face. Fortunate Juchs and
Siegfried, I thought, to have had it to look forward to every morning.
That they were undeserving of their good fortune I patriotically felt
sure, as I sat considering the gentle sweep of her eyelashes while she
buttered her toast. Yet they did, both of them, make her happy; or
perhaps it was that she made them happy, and caught her own happiness
back again, as it were on the rebound. With any ordinarily kind and
decent husband this must be possible. That she _had_ been happy was
evident, for unhappiness leaves traces, and I've never seen an object
quite so unmarked, quite so candid as Dolly's intelligent and charming
brow.

We finished our breakfast in silence; and no sooner had the table been
plucked out from our midst by the swift, disconcerting Antoines, than my
uncle got up and went to the window.

There he stood with his back to us.

'Do you feel equal to a walk?' he asked, not turning round.

Profound silence.

We three, still sitting round the blank the vanished table had left,
looked at each other, our eyes inquiring mutely, 'Is it I?'

But I knew it was me.

'Do you mean me, Uncle Rudolph?' I therefore asked; for after all it had
best be got over quickly.

'Yes, dear child.'

'Now?'

'If you will.'

'There's no esc--you don't think the weather too horrid?'

'Bracing.'

I sighed, and went away to put on my nailed boots.

Relations ... what right had he ... as though I hadn't suffered
horribly ... and on such an unpleasant morning ... if at least it had
been fine and warm ... but to be taken up a mountain in a bitter wind so
as to be made miserable on the top....

And two hours later, when I was perched exactly as I had feared on a
cold rock, reached after breathless toil in a searching wind, perched
draughtily and shorn of every cob-web I could ever in my life have
possessed, helplessly exposed to the dreaded talking-to, Uncle Rudolph,
settling himself at my feet, after a long and terrifying silence during
which I tremblingly went over my defences in the vain effort to assure
myself that perhaps I wasn't going to be _much_ hurt, said:

'How does she spell it?'

Really one is very fatuous. Absorbed in myself, I hadn't thought of
Dolly.


_October 3rd._

It was so late last night when I got to that, that I went to bed. Now it
is before breakfast, and I'll finish about yesterday.

Uncle Rudolph had taken me up the mountain only to talk of Dolly.
Incredible as it may seem, he has fallen in love. At first sight. At
sixty. I am sure a woman can't do that, so that this by itself convinces
me he is a man. Three days ago I wrote in this very book that a dean
isn't quite my idea of a man. I retract. He is.

Well, while I was shrinking and shivering on my own account, waiting for
him to begin digging about among my raw places, he said instead, 'How
does she spell it?' and threw my thoughts into complete confusion.

Blankly I gazed at him while I struggled to rearrange them on this new
basis. It was such an entirely unexpected question. I did not at this
stage dream of what had happened to him. It never would have occurred to
me that Dolly would have so immediate an effect, simply by sitting
there, simply by producing her dimple at the right moment. Attractive as
she is, it is her ways rather than her looks that are so adorable; and
what could Uncle Rudolph have seen of her ways in so brief a time? He
has simply fallen in love with a smile. And he sixty. And he one's
uncle. Amazing Dolly; irresistible apparently, to uncles.

'Do you mean Mrs. Jewks's name?' I asked, when I was able to speak.

'Yes,' said my uncle.

'I haven't seen it written,' I said, restored so far by my relief--for
Dolly had saved me--that I had the presence of mind to hedge. I was
obliged to hedge. In my mind's eye I saw Mrs. Barnes's face imploring
me.

'No doubt,' said my uncle after another silence, 'it is spelt on the
same principle as Molyneux.'

'Very likely,' I agreed.

'It sounds as though her late husband's family might originally have
been French.'

'It does rather.'

'Possibly Huguenot.'

'Yes.'

'I was much astonished that she should be a widow.'

'_Yet not one widow but two widows...._' ran at this like a refrain in
my mind, perhaps because I was sitting so close to a dean. Aloud I said,
for by now I had completely recovered, 'Why, Uncle Rudolph? Widows do
abound.'

'Alas, yes. But there is something peculiarly virginal about Mrs.
Jewks.'

I admitted that this was so. Part of Dolly's attractiveness is the odd
impression she gives of untouchedness, of gay aloofness.

My uncle broke off a stalk of the withered last summer's grass and began
nibbling it. He was lying on his side a little below me, resting on his
elbow. His black, neat legs looked quaint stuck through the long yellow
grass. He had taken off his hat, hardy creature, and the wind blew his
grey hair this way and that, and sometimes flattened it down in a fringe
over his eyes. When this happened he didn't look a bit like anybody
good, but he pushed it back each time, smoothing it down again with an
abstracted carefulness, his eyes fixed on the valley far below. He
wasn't seeing the valley.

'How long has the poor young thing--' he began.

'You will be surprised to hear,' I interrupted him, 'that Mrs. Jewks is
forty.'

'Really,' said my uncle, staring round at me. 'Really. That is indeed
surprising.' And after a pause he added, 'Surprising and gratifying.'

'Why gratifying, Uncle Rudolph?' I inquired.

'When did she lose her husband?' he asked, taking no notice of my
inquiry.

The preliminary to an accurate answer to this question was, of course,
Which? But again a vision of Mrs. Barnes's imploring face rose before
me, and accordingly, restricting myself to Juchs, I said she had lost
him shortly before the war.

'Ah. So he was prevented, poor fellow, from having the honour of dying
for England.'

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph.'

'Poor fellow. Poor fellow.'

'Yes.'

'Poor fellow. Well, he was spared knowing what he had missed. At least
he was spared that. And she--his poor wife--how did she take it?'

'Well, I think.'

'Yes. I can believe it. She wouldn't--I am very sure she
wouldn't--intrude her sorrows selfishly on others.'

It was at this point that I became aware my uncle had fallen in love. Up
to this, oddly enough, it hadn't dawned on me. Now it did more than
dawned, it blazed.

I looked at him with a new and startled interest. 'Uncle Rudolph,' I
said impetuously, no longer a distrustful niece talking to an uncle she
suspects, but an equal with an equal, a human being with another human
being, 'haven't you ever thought of marrying again? It's quite a long
time now since Aunt Winifred--'

'Thought?' said my uncle, his voice sounding for the first time simply,
ordinarily human, without a trace in it of the fatal pulpit flavour,
'Thought? I'm always thinking of it.'

And except for his apron and gaiters he might have been any ordinary
solitary little man eating out his heart for a mate.

'But then why don't you? Surely a deanery of all places wants a wife in
it?'

'Of course it does Those strings or rooms--empty, echoing. It shouts
for a wife. Shouts, I tell you. At least mine does. But I've never
found--I hadn't seen--'

He broke off, biting at the stalk of grass.

'But I remember you,' I went on eagerly, 'always surrounded by flocks of
devoted women. Weren't any of them--?'

'No,' said my uncle shortly. And after a second of silence he said
again, and so loud that I jumped, 'No!' And then he went on even more
violently, 'They didn't give me a chance. They never let me alone a
minute. After Winifred's death they were like flies. Stuck to me--made
me sick--great flies crawling--' And he shuddered, and shook himself as
though he were shaking off the lot of them.

I looked at him in amazement. 'Why,' I cried, 'you're talking exactly
like a man!'

But he, staring at the view without seeing an inch of it, took no heed
of me, and I heard him say under his breath as though I hadn't been
there at all, 'My God, I'm so lonely at night!'

That finished it. In that moment I began to love my uncle. At this
authentic cry of forlornness I had great difficulty in not bending over
and putting my arms round him,--just to comfort him, just to keep him
warm. It must be a dreadful thing to be sixty and all alone. You look so
grown up. You look as though you must have so many resources, so few
needs; and you are accepted as provided for, what with your career
accomplished, and your houses and servants and friends and books and all
the rest of it--all the empty, meaningless rest of it; for really you
are the most miserable of motherless cold babies, conscious that you are
motherless, conscious that nobody soft and kind and adoring is ever
again coming to croon over you and kiss you good-night and be there next
morning to smile when you wake up.

'Uncle Rudolph--' I began.

Then I stopped, and bending over took the stalk of grass he kept on
biting out of his hand.

'I can't let you eat any more of that,' I said. 'It's not good for you.'

And having got hold of his hand I kept it.

There now, I said, holding it tight.

He looked up at me vaguely, absorbed in his thoughts; then, realising
how tight his hand was being held, he smiled.

'You dear child,' he said, scanning my face as though he had never seen
it before.

'Yes?' I said, smiling in my turn and not letting go of his hand. 'I
like that. I didn't like any of the other dear children I was.'

'Which other dear children?'

'Uncle Rudolph,' I said, 'let's go home. This is a bleak place. Why do
we sit here shivering forlornly when there's all that waiting for us
down there?'

And loosing his hand I got on to my feet, and when I was on them I held
out both my hands to him and pulled him up, and he standing lower than
where I was our eyes were then on a level.

'All what?' he asked, his eyes searching mine.

'Oh, Uncle Rudolph! Warmth and Dolly, of course.'


_October 4th._

But it hasn't been quite so simple. Nothing last night was different. My
uncle remained tongue-tied. Dolly sat waiting to smile at anecdotes that
he never told. Mrs. Barnes knitted uneasily, already fearing, perhaps,
because of his strange silence, that he somehow may have scented
Siegfried, else how inexplicable his silence after that one bright,
wonderful first evening and morning.

It was I last night who did the talking, it was I who took up the line,
abandoned by my uncle, of wholesome entertainment. I too told anecdotes;
and when I had told all the ones I knew and still nobody said anything,
I began to tell all the ones I didn't know. Anything rather than that
continued uncomfortable silence. But how very difficult it was. I grew
quite damp with effort. And nobody except Dolly so much as smiled; and
even Dolly, though she smiled, especially when I embarked on my second
series of anecdotes, looked at me with a mild inquiry, as if she were
wondering what was the matter with me.

Wretched, indeed, is the hostess upon whose guests has fallen, from
whatever cause, a blight.


_October 5th._

Crabbe's son, in the life he wrote of his father, asks: '_Will it seem
wonderful when we consider how he was situated at this time, that with a
most affectionate heart, a peculiar attachment to female society, and
with unwasted passions, Mr. Crabbe, though in his sixty-second year
should have again thought of marriage? I feel satisfied that no one will
be seriously shocked with such an evidence of the freshness of his
feelings._'

A little shocked; Crabbe's son was prepared to allow this much; but not
_seriously_.

Well, it is a good thing my uncle didn't live at that period, for it
would have gone hard with him. His feelings are more than fresh, they
are violent.


_October 6th._

While Dolly is in the room Uncle Rudolph never moves, but sits
tongue-tied staring at her. If she goes away he at once gets up and
takes me by the arm and walks me off on to the terrace, where in a
biting wind we pace up and down.

Our positions are completely reversed. It is I now who am the wise old
relative, counselling, encouraging, listening to outpours. Up and down
we pace, up and down, very fast because of the freshness of Uncle's
Rudolph's feelings and also of the wind, arm in arm, I trying to keep
step, he not bothering about such things as step, absorbed in his
condition, his hopes, his fears--especially his fears. For he is
terrified lest, having at last found the perfect woman, she won't have
him. 'Why should she?' he asks almost angrily, 'Why should she? Tell me
why she should.'

'I can't tell you,' I say, for Uncle Rudolph and I are now the frankest
friends. 'But I can't tell you either why she shouldn't. Think how nice
you are, Uncle Rudolph. And Dolly is naturally very affectionate.'

'She is perfect, perfect,' vehemently declares my uncle.

And Mrs. Barnes, who from the window watches us while we walk, looks
with anxious questioning eyes at my face when we come in. What can my
uncle have to talk about so eagerly to me when he is out on the terrace,
and why does he stare in such stony silence at Dolly when he comes in?
Poor Mrs. Barnes.


_October 7th._

The difficulty about Dolly for courting purposes is that she is never to
be got alone, not even into a corner out of earshot of Mrs. Barnes. Mrs.
Barnes doesn't go away for a moment, except together with Dolly.
Wonderful how clever she is at it. She is obsessed by terror lest the
horrid marriage to the German uncle should somehow be discovered. If she
was afraid of my knowing it she is a hundred times more afraid of Uncle
Rudolph's knowing it. So persistent is her humility, so great and remote
a dignitary does he seem to her, that the real situation hasn't even
glimmered on her. All she craves is to keep this holy and distinguished
man's good opinion, to protect her Dolly, her darling erring one, from
his just but unbearable contempt. Therefore she doesn't budge. Dolly is
never to be got alone.

'A man,' said my uncle violently to me this morning, 'can't propose to a
woman before her sister.'

'You've quite decided you're going to?' I asked, keeping up with him as
best I could, trotting beside him up and down the terrace.

'The minute I can catch her alone. I can't stand any more of this. I
must know. If she won't have me--my God, if she won't have me--!'

I laid hold affectionately of his arm. 'Oh, but she will,' I said
reassuringly. 'Dolly is rather a creature of habit, you know.'

'You mean she has got used to marriage--'

'Well, I do think she is rather used to it. Uncle Rudolph,' I went on,
hesitating as I have hesitated a dozen times these last few days as to
whether I oughtn't to tell him about Juchs--Siegfried would be a shock,
but Juchs would be crushing unless very carefully explained--'you don't
feel you don't think you'd like to know something more about Dolly
first? I mean before you propose?'

'No!' shouted my uncle.

Afterwards he said more quietly that he could see through a brick wall
as well as most men, and that Dolly wasn't a brick wall but the perfect
woman. What could be told him that he didn't see for himself? Nothing,
said my uncle.

What can be done with a man in love? Nothing, say I.


_October 8th._

Sometimes I feel very angry with Dolly that she should have got herself
so tiresomely mixed up with Germans. How simple everything would be now
if only she hadn't! But when I am calm again I realise that she couldn't
help it. It is as natural to her to get mixed up as to breathe. Very
sweet, affectionate natures are always getting mixed up. I suppose if it
weren't for Mrs. Barnes's constant watchfulness and her own earnest
desire never again to distress poor Kitty, she would at an early stage
of their war wanderings have become some ardent Swiss hotelkeeper's
wife. Just to please him; just because else he would be miserable. Dolly
ought to be married. It is the only certain way of saving her from
marriage.


_October 9th._

It is snowing. The wind howls, and the snow whirls, and we can't go out
and so get away from each other. Uncle Rudolph is obliged, when Dolly
isn't there, to continue sitting with Mrs. Barnes. He can't to-day hurry
me out on to the terrace. There's only the hall in this house to sit in,
for that place I pay the household books in is no more than a cupboard.

Uncle Rudolph could just bear Mrs. Barnes when he could get away from
her; to-day he can't bear her at all. Everything that should be
characteristic of a dean--patience, courtesy, kindliness, has been
stripped off him by his eagerness to propose and the impossibility of
doing it. There's nothing at all left now of what he was but that empty
symbol, his apron.


_October 10th._

My uncle is fermenting with checked, prevented courting. And he ought to
be back in England. He ought to have gone back almost at once, he says.
He only came out for three or four days--

'Yes; just time to settle _me_ in,' I said.

'Yes,' he said, smiling, 'and then take you home with me by the ear.'

He has some very important meetings he is to preside at coming off soon,
and here he is, hung up. It is Mrs. Barnes who is the cause of it, and
naturally he isn't very nice to her. In vain does she try to please him;
the one thing he wants her to do, to go away and leave him with Dolly,
she of course doesn't. She sits there, saying meek things about the
weather, expressing a modest optimism, ready to relinquish even that if
my uncle differs, becoming, when he takes up a book, respectfully quiet,
ready the moment he puts it down to rejoice with him if he wishes to
rejoice or weep with him if he prefers weeping; and the more she is
concerned to give satisfaction the less well-disposed is he towards her.
He can't forgive her inexplicable fixedness. Her persistent,
unintermittent gregariousness is incomprehensible to him. All he wants,
being reduced to simplicity by love, is to be left alone with Dolly. He
can't understand, being a man, why if he wants this he shouldn't get
it.

'You're not kind to Mrs. Barnes,' I said to him this afternoon. 'You've
made her quite unnatural. She is cowed.'

'I am unable to like her,' said my uncle shortly.

'You are quite wrong not to. She has had bitter troubles, and is all
goodness. I don't think I ever met anybody so completely unselfish.'

'I wish she would go and be unselfish in her own room, then,' said my
uncle.

'I don't know you,' I said, shrugging my shoulders. 'You arrived here
dripping unction and charitableness, and now--'

'Why doesn't she give me a chance?' he cried. 'She never budges. These
women who stick, who can't bear to be by themselves--good heavens,
hasn't she prayers she ought to be saying, and underclothes she ought to
mend?'

'I don't believe you care so very much for Dolly after all,' I said, 'or
you would be kind to the sister she is so deeply devoted to.'

This sobered him. 'I'll try,' said my uncle; and it was quite hard not
to laugh at the change in our positions--I the grey-beard now, the wise
rebuker, he the hot-headed yet well-intentioned young relative.


_October 11th._

I think guests ought to like each other; love each other if they prefer
it, but at least like. They too have their duties, and one of them is to
resist nourishing aversions; or, if owing to their implacable
dispositions they can't help nourishing them, oughtn't they to try very
hard not to show it? They should consider the helpless position of the
hostess, she who, at any rate theoretically, is bound to be equally
attached to them all.

Before my uncle came it is true we had begun to fester, but we festered
nicely. Mrs. Barnes and I did it with every mark of consideration and
politeness. We were ladies. Uncle Rudolph is no lady; and this little
house, which I daresay looks a picture of peace from outside with the
snow falling on its roof and the firelight shining in its windows,
seethes with elemental passions. Fear, love, anger--they all dwell in it
now, all brought into it by him, all coming out of the mixture, so
innocuous one would think, so likely, one would think, to produce only
the fruits of the spirit,--the mixture of two widows and one clergyman.
Wonderful how much can be accomplished with small means. Also, most
wonderful the centuries that seem to separate me from those July days
when I lay innocently on the grass watching the clouds pass over the
blue of the delphinium tops, before ever I had set eyes on Mrs. Barnes
and Dolly, and while Uncle Rudolph, far away at home and not even
beginning to think of a passport, was being normal in his Deanery.

He has, I am sure, done what he promised and tried to be kinder to Mrs.
Barnes, and I can only conclude he was not able to manage it, for I see
no difference. He glowers and glowers, and she immovably knits. And in
spite of the silence that reigns except when, for a desperate moment, I
make an effort to be amusing, there is a curious feeling that we are
really living in a state of muffled uproar, in a constant condition of
barely suppressed brawl. I feel as though the least thing, the least
touch, even somebody coughing, and the house will blow up. I catch
myself walking carefully across the hall so as not to shake it, not to
knock against the furniture. How secure, how peaceful, of what a great
and splendid simplicity do those July days, those pre-guest days, seem
now!


_October 12th._

I went into Dolly's bedroom last night, crept in on tiptoe because there
is a door leading from it into Mrs. Barnes's room, caught hold firmly
of her wrist, and led her, without saying a word and taking infinite
care to move quietly, into my bedroom. Then, having shut her in, I said,
'What are you going to do about it?'

She didn't pretend not to understand. The candour of Dolly's brow is an
exact reflection of the candour of her mind.

'About your uncle,' she said, nodding. 'I like him very much.'

'Enough to marry him?'

'Oh quite. I always like people enough to marry them.' And she added, as
though in explanation of this perhaps rather excessively amiable
tendency, 'Husbands are so kind.'

'You ought to know,' I conceded.

'I do,' said Dolly, with the sweetest reminiscent smile.

'Uncle Rudolph is only waiting to get you alone to propose,' I said.

Dolly nodded. There was nothing I could tell her that she wasn't already
aware of.

'As you appear to have noticed everything,' I said, 'I suppose you have
also noticed that he is very much in love with you.'

'Oh yes,' said Dolly placidly.

'So much in love that he doesn't seem even to remember that he's a
dignitary of the Church, and when he's alone with me he behaves in a way
I'm sure the Church wouldn't like at all. Why, he almost swears.'

'_Isn't_ it a good thing?' said Dolly, approvingly.

'Yes. But now what is to be done about Siegfried--'

'Dear Siegfried,' murmured Dolly.

'And Juchs--'

'Poor darling,' murmured Dolly.

'Yes, yes. But oughtn't Uncle Rudolph to be told?'

'Of course,' said Dolly, her eyes a little surprised that I should want
to know anything so obvious.

'You told me it would kill Kitty if I knew about Juchs. It will kill her
twice as much if Uncle Rudolph knows.'

'Kitty won't know anything about it. At least, not till it's all over.
My dear, when it comes to marrying I can't be stuck all about with
secrets.'

'Do you mean to tell my uncle yourself?'

'Of course,' said Dolly, again with surprise in her eyes.

'When?'

'When he asks me to marry him. Till he does I don't quite see what it
has to do with him.'

'And you're not afraid--you don't think your second marriage will be a
great shock to him? He being a dean, and nourished on Tables of
Affinity?'

'I can't help it if it is. He has got to know. If he loves me enough it
won't matter to him, and if he doesn't love me enough it won't matter to
him either.'

'Because then his objections to Juchs would be greater than his wish to
marry you?'

'Yes,' said Dolly, smiling. 'It would mean,' she went on, 'that he
wasn't fond of me _enough_.'

'And you wouldn't mind?'

Her eyes widened a little. 'Why should I mind?'

'No. I suppose you wouldn't, as you're not in love.'

I then remarked that, though I could understand her not being in love
with a man my uncle's age, it was my belief that she had never in her
life been in love. Not even with Siegfried. Not with anybody.

Dolly said she hadn't, and that she liked people much too much to want
to grab at them.

'Grab at them!'

'That's what your being in love does,' said Dolly. 'It grabs.'

'But you've been grabbed yourself, and you liked it. Uncle Rudolph is
certainly bent on grabbing you.'

'Yes. But the man gets over it quicker. He grabs and has done with it,
and then settles down to the real things,--affection and kindness. A
woman hasn't ever done with it. She can't let go. And the poor thing,
because she what you call loves, is so dreadfully vulnerable, and gets
so hurt, so hurt--'

Dolly began kissing me and stroking my hair.

'I think though,' I said, while she was doing this, 'I'd rather have
loved thoroughly--you can call it grabbing if you like, I don't care
what ugly words you use--and been vulnerable and got hurt, than never
once have felt--than just be a sort of amiable amoeba--'

'Has it occurred to you,' interrupted Dolly, continuing to kiss me--her
cheek was against mine, and she was stroking my hair very
tenderly--'that if I marry that dear little uncle of yours I shall be
your aunt?'


_October 13th._

Well, then, if Dolly is ready to marry my uncle and my uncle is dying to
marry Dolly, all that remains to be done is to remove Mrs. Barnes for an
hour from the hall. An hour would be long enough, I think, to include
everything,--five minutes for the proposal, fifteen for presenting
Siegfried, thirty-five for explaining Juchs, and five for the final
happy mutual acceptances.

This very morning I must somehow manage to get Mrs. Barnes away. How it
is to be done I can't think; especially for so long as an hour. Yet
Juchs and Siegfried couldn't be rendered intelligible, I feel, in less
than fifty minutes between them. Yes; it will have to be an hour.

I have tried over and over again the last few days to lure Mrs. Barnes
out of the hall, but it has been useless. Is it possible that I shall
have to do something unpleasant to myself, hurt myself, hurt something
that takes time to bandage? The idea is repugnant to me; still, things
can't go on like this.

I asked Dolly last night if I hadn't better draw Mrs. Barnes's attention
to my uncle's lovelorn condition, for obviously the marriage would be a
solution of all her difficulties and could give her nothing but
extraordinary relief and joy; but Dolly wouldn't let me. She said that
it would only agonise poor Kitty to become aware that my uncle was in
love, for she would be quite certain that the moment he heard about
Juchs horror would take the place of love. How could a dean of the
Church of England, Kitty would say, bring himself to take as wife one
who had previously been married to an item in the forbidden list of the
Tables of Affinity? And Juchs being German would only, she would feel,
make it so much more awful. Besides, said Dolly, smiling and shaking her
head, my uncle mightn't propose at all. He might change again. I myself
had been astonished, she reminded me, at the sudden violent change he
had already undergone from unction to very nearly swearing; he might
easily under-go another back again, and then what a pity to have
disturbed the small amount of peace of mind poor Kitty had.

'She hasn't any, ever,' I said; impatiently, I'm afraid.

'Not very much,' admitted Dolly with wistful penitence. 'And it has all
been my fault.'

But what I was thinking was that Kitty never has any peace of mind
because she hasn't any mind to have peace in.

I didn't say this, however.

I practised tact.


_Later._

Well, it has come off. Mrs. Barnes is out of the hall, and at this very
moment Uncle Rudolph and Dolly are alone together in it, proposing and
being proposed to. He is telling her that he worships her, and in reply
she is gently drawing his attention to Siegfried and Juchs. How much
will he mind them? Will he mind them at all? Will his love triumphantly
consume them, or, having swallowed Siegfried, will he find himself
unable to manage Juchs?

Oh, I love people to be happy! I love them to love each other! I do hope
it will be all right! Dolly may say what she likes, but love is the only
thing in the world that works miracles. Look at Uncle Rudolph. I'm more
doubtful, though, of the result than I would have been yesterday,
because what brought about Mrs. Barnes's absence from the hall has made
me nervous as to how he will face the disclosing of Juchs.

While I'm waiting I may as well write it down,--by my clock I count up
that Dolly must be a third of the way through Siegfried now, so that
I've still got three quarters of an hour.

This is what happened:

The morning started badly, indeed terribly. Dolly, bored by being stared
at in silence, said something about more wool and went upstairs quite
soon after breakfast. My uncle, casting a despairing glance at the
window past which the snow was driving, scowled for a moment or two at
Mrs. Barnes, then picked up a stale _Times_ and hid himself behind it.

To make up for his really dreadful scowl at Mrs. Barnes I began a
pleasant conversation with her, but at once she checked me, saying,
'Sh--sh--,' and deferentially indicating, with her knitting needle, my
reading uncle.

Incensed by such slavishness, I was about to rebel and insist on talking
when he, stirred apparently by something of a bloodthirsty nature that
he saw in the _Times_, exclaimed in a very loud voice, 'Search as I
may--and I have searched most diligently--I can't find a single good
word to say for Germans.'

It fell like a bomb. He hasn't mentioned Germans once. I had come to
feel quite safe. The shock of it left me dumb. Mrs. Barnes's knitting
needles stopped as if struck. I didn't dare look at her. Dead silence.

My uncle lowered the paper and glanced round at us, expecting agreement,
impatient of our not instantly saying we thought as he did.

'Can _you_?' he asked me, as I said nothing, being petrified.

I was just able to shake my head.

'Can _you_?' he asked, turning to Mrs. Barnes.

Her surprising answer--surprising, naturally, to my uncle--was to get up
quickly, drop all her wool on the floor, and hurry upstairs.

He watched her departure with amazement. Still with amazement, when she
had disappeared, his eyes sought mine.

Why, he said, staring at me aghast, 'why--the woman's a pro-German!'

In my turn I stared aghast.

'Mrs. _Barnes_?' I exclaimed, stung to quite a loud exclamation by the
grossness of this injustice.

'Yes,' said my uncle, horrified. 'Yes. Didn't you notice her expression?
Good heavens--and I who've taken care not to speak to a pro-German for
five years, and had hoped, God willing, never to speak to one again,
much less--' he banged his fists on the arms of the chair, and the
_Times_ slid on to the floor--'much less be under the same roof with
one.'

'Well then, you see, God wasn't willing,' I said, greatly shocked.

Here was the ecclesiastic coming up again with a vengeance in all the
characteristic anti-Christian qualities; and I was so much stirred by
his readiness to believe what he thinks is the very worst of poor,
distracted Mrs. Barnes, that I flung caution to the winds and went
indignantly on: 'It isn't Mrs. Barnes who is pro-German in this
house--it's Dolly.'

'What?' cried my uncle.

'Yes,' I repeated, nodding my head at him defiantly, for having said it
I was scared, 'it's Dolly.'

'Dolly?' echoed my uncle, grasping the arms of his chair.

'Perhaps pro-German doesn't quite describe it,' I hurried on nervously,
'and yet I don't know--I think it would. Perhaps it's better to say that
she is--she is of an unprejudiced international spirit--'

Then I suddenly realised that Mrs. Barnes was gone. Driven away. Not
likely to appear again for ages.

I got up quickly. 'Look here, Uncle Rudolph,' I said, making hastily,
even as Mrs. Barnes had made, for the stairs, 'you ask Dolly about it
yourself. I'll go and tell her to come down. You ask her about being
pro-German. She'll tell you. Only--' I ran back to him and lowered my
voice--'propose first. She won't tell you unless you've proposed first.'

Then, as he sat clutching the arms of his chair and staring at me, I
bent down and whispered, 'Now's your chance, Uncle Rudolph. You've
settled poor Mrs. Barnes for a bit. She won't interrupt. I'll send
Dolly--goodbye--good luck!'

And hurriedly kissing him I hastened upstairs to Dolly's room.

Because of the door leading out of it into Mrs. Barnes's room I had to
be as cautious as I was last night. I did exactly the same things: went
in on tiptoe, took hold of her firmly by the wrist, and led her out
without a word. Then all I had to do was to point to the stairs, and at
the same time make a face--but a kind face, I hope--at her sister's shut
door, and the intelligent Dolly did the rest.

She proceeded with a sober dignity pleasant to watch, along the passage
in order to be proposed to. Practice in being proposed to has made her
perfect. At the top of the stairs she turned and smiled at me,--her
dimple was adorable. I waved my hand; she disappeared; and here I am.

Forty minutes of the hour are gone. She must be in the very middle now
of Juchs.


_Night._

I knew this little house was made for kindness and love. I've always,
since first it was built, had the feeling that it was blest. Sure indeed
was the instinct that brought me away from England, doggedly dragging
myself up the mountain to tumble my burdens down in this place. It
invariably conquers. Nobody can resist it. Nobody can go away from here
quite as they arrived, unless to start with they were of those blessed
ones who wherever they go carry peace with them in their hearts. From
the first I have felt that the worried had only got to come here to be
smoothed out, and the lonely to be exhilarated, and the unhappy to be
comforted, and the old to be made young. Now to this list must be added:
and the widowed to be wedded; because all is well with Uncle Rudolph and
Dolly, and the house once more is in its normal state of having no one
in it who isn't happy.

For I grew happy--completely so for the moment, and I shouldn't be
surprised if I had really done now with the other thing--the minute I
caught sight of Uncle Rudolph's face when I went downstairs.

Dolly was sitting by the file looking pleased. My uncle was standing on
the rug; and when he saw me he came across to me holding out both his
hands, and I stopped on the bottom stair, my hands in his, and we looked
at each other and laughed,--sheer happiness we laughed for.

Then we kissed each other, I still on the bottom stair and therefore
level with him, and then he said, his face full of that sweet affection
for the whole world that radiates from persons in his situation, 'And to
think that I came here only to scold you!'

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph,' I said. 'To think of it!'

'Well, if I came to scold I've stayed to love,' he said.

'Which,' said I, while we beamed at each other, 'as the Bible says, is
far better.'

Then Dolly went upstairs to tell Mrs. Barnes--lovely to be going to
strike off somebody's troubles with a single sentence!--and my uncle
confessed to me that for the first time a doubt of Dolly had shadowed
his idea of her when I left him sitting there while I fetched her--

'Conceive it--conceive it!' he cried, smiting his hands together.
'Conceive letting Germans--_Germans_, if you please--get even for half
an instant between her and me!'--but that the minute he saw her coming
down the stairs to him such love of her flooded him that he got up and
proposed to her before she had so much as reached the bottom. And it was
from the stairs, as from a pulpit, that Dolly, supporting herself on the
balustrade, expounded Siegfried and Juchs.

She wouldn't come down till she had finished with them. She was, I
gathered, ample over Siegfried, but when it came to Juchs she was
profuse. Every single aspect of them both that was most likely to make a
dean think it impossible to marry her was pointed out and enlarged upon.
She wouldn't, she announced, come down a stair further till my uncle was
in full possession of all the facts, while at the same time carefully
bearing in mind the Table of Affinity.

'And were you terribly surprised and shocked, Uncle Rudolph?' I asked,
standing beside him with our backs to the fire in our now familiar
attitude of arm in arm.

My uncle is an ugly little man, yet at that moment I could have sworn
that he had the face of an angel. He looked at me and smiled. It was the
wonderfullest smile.

'I don't know what I was,' he said. 'When she had done I just said, "My
Beloved"--and then she came down.'


_October 15th._

This is my last night here, and this is the last time I shall write in
my old-age book. To-morrow we all go away together, to Bern, where my
uncle and Dolly will be married, and then he takes her to England, and
Mrs. Barnes and I will also proceed there, discreetly, by another route.

So are the wanderings of Mrs. Barnes and Dolly ended, and Mrs. Barnes
will enter into her idea of perfect bliss, which is to live in the very
bosom of the Church with a cathedral almost in her back garden. For my
uncle, prepared at this moment to love anybody, also loves Mrs. Barnes,
and has invited her to make her home with him. At this moment indeed he
would invite everybody to make their homes with him, for not only has he
invited me but I heard him most cordially pressing those peculiarly
immovable Antoines to use his house as their headquarters whenever they
happen to be in England.

I think a tendency to invite runs in the family, for I too have been
busy inviting. I have invited Mrs. Barnes to stay with me in London till
she goes to the Deanery, and she has accepted. Together we shall travel
thither, and together we shall dwell there, I am sure, in that unity
which is praised by the Psalmist as a good and pleasant thing.

She will stay with me for the weeks during which my uncle wishes to have
Dolly all to himself. I think there will be a great many of those weeks,
from what I know of Dolly; but being with a happy Mrs. Barnes will be
different from being with her as she was here. She is so happy that she
consists entirely of unclouded affection. The puckers from her face, and
the fears and concealments from her heart, have all gone together. She
is as simple and as transparent as a child. She always was transparent,
but without knowing it; now she herself has pulled off her veils, and
cordially requests one to look her through and through and see for
oneself how there is nothing there but contentment. A little
happiness,--what wonders it works! Was there ever anything like it?

This is a place of blessing. When I came up my mountain three months
ago, alone and so miserable, no vision was vouchsafed me that I would go
down it again one of four people, each of whom would leave the little
house full of renewed life, of restored hope, of wholesome
looking-forward, clarified, set on their feet, made useful once more to
themselves and the world. After all, we're none of us going to be
wasted. Whatever there is of good in any of us isn't after all going to
be destroyed by circumstances and thrown aside as useless. When I am so
foolish--_if_ I am so foolish I should say, for I feel completely cured!
as to begin thinking backwards again with anything but a benevolent
calm, I shall instantly come out here and invite the most wretched of my
friends to join me, and watch them and myself being made whole.

The house, I think, ought to be rechristened.

It ought to be called _Chalet du Fleuve Jordan_.

But perhaps my guests mightn't like that.



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