Henrietta paid her father a visit before they started abroad. The
promise of the first days was amply fulfilled; the whole house was
happy, and Henrietta was touched by the warmth of her welcome. After the
squalor of lodgings home was pleasant, and her father's invitation was
cordial: "Henrietta, why don't you stay with us? Mildred," with a fond
look at his wife, "never will allow your room to be used; it's always
ready waiting for you."
It was a temptation to Henrietta, but she refused partly from pride,
from a feeling that she ought not to disturb the present comfort, but
also because it was getting a principle with her, as apparently with
many middle-aged Englishwoman, that she must always be going abroad. Yet
she knew that Miss Gurney did not particularly want to have her, and had
invited her more from laziness than from anything else.
They went abroad--it was to the Italian Lakes--and a life of sitting in
the sun, walking up and down promenades, short drives, and making and
unmaking of desultory friendships began. They grumbled a good deal to
third parties, but still they were happy enough, according to their low
standard of happiness.
As they were abroad for an indefinite period, there was none of the
feeling of rush, which they had enjoyed so much before, but sometimes
they played the Italian game, and had packed-in days; called, 6.45;
coffee, 7.30; train, 8.21; arrive at destination, 11.23; go to Croce
d'Oro for coffee, visit churches of Santa Maria and San Giovanni, and
museum: _table d'hote_ luncheon, 1.30; drive to Roman remains, back to
Croce d'Oro for tea; separate for shopping and meet at station, 5.20,
for train, 5.30; back for special _table d'hote_ kept for them in the
_salle a manger_. Henrietta would settle it all with Baedeker and the
railway guide the night before, and if she had felt apprehension at her
failing powers in history, her grasp of this kind of day could not have
been bettered. Everything was seen and everything was timed, and the
only person who might have something to complain of, was the delicate
niece, who went through her treat too exhausted to open her mouth,
counting the hours when she might go to her bed in peace.
At last Miss Gurney and the niece decided to return to England.
Henrietta found some Americans who wanted to stay at Montreux, and they
asked her to join them. After Montreux came Chamounix, and in the autumn
Miss Gurney's niece came out again, and she and Henrietta stayed at
Como, and then at Mentone till April. Then came Switzerland again. Then
Henrietta went to England for a round of visits, and by the end of them
she was longing to be back abroad. She said that England was depressing,
and gave her rheumatism, and that she (in the best of health and prime
of life) could not face an English winter. The fact was she did not care
for the sharing of other people's lives which is expected from a
visitor, and her long sojourn in hotels with no one but herself to
consider, had made her less easy to live with. So without exactly
knowing how, she drifted into spending almost all her time abroad. Every
other year she came back for visits in the summer, but in the spring,
autumn, and winter she wandered from one cheap _pension_ to another in
Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, or Switzerland.
If she had led a half-occupied life as keeper of her father's house, she
now learnt the art of getting through a day in which she did absolutely
nothing. When she became accustomed to it, the very smallest service
required of her was regarded as a cross. Sometimes a relation would
commission her to buy something abroad, and then the _salle a manger_
would resound with wails, because she must go round the corner, select
an article, and give orders to the shopman to despatch it to England.
The friends who asked her to engage rooms for them at an hotel, had
cause to rue their request; they never heard the end of it.
Many lonely women receive great solace from their church, and give
solace in return. Where would the church and the poor be without them?
But Henrietta was never long enough in her caravanserais to become
attached to the services of the chaplains in the _salle a manger_, and
she soon gave up churchgoing. At first she spent a great deal of time
inventing reasons to keep her conscience quiet, such as that it had
rained in the night and therefore might rain again, or that she did not
approve of chanting Amen, but later she did not see why there should be
a reason, and left her conscious to its remorse.
Bad health is another resource for unoccupied women, and it certainly
occurred to her as an occupation, but she realized that it and roving
cannot be combined, and of the two she preferred roving.
Her chief pastime was to skim through novels, any novels that could be
found, costume novels of English history by preference. This was how her
bent for learning satisfied itself. She never remembered the author, or
title, or anything of what she read, but at the same time she was
obsessed with the idea that she must always have something new, and
would constantly accuse her friends, or the library, of deceiving her
with books she had read before. "If you can't remember, what does it
matter?" her dreadfully reasonable nieces would exclaim, not realizing
that her sole interest in the novels was the collector's interest of
seeing how many new ones she could find.
A second pastime was her patience, that bond which knits together our
occidental civilization. She was always learning new patiences, and
always mixing them up with one another. This was another source of
annoyance to efficient nieces. "But that is not demon, Aunt Etta," they
would explain, playing patience severely from a sense of duty. She
cheated so persistently that there was no room for skill. "I can't
conceive why you play," they said crossly. But the reason was perfectly
clear. It stared one in the face. During the patience the clock had
moved from ten minutes past eight to twenty-five minutes to ten.
Henrietta also killed time now and then with sights; not churches or old
pictures, of course she never went near masterpieces now she had ample
leisure for seeing them, but Easter services, royal birthday
processions, or battles of flowers. As she seldom broke her routine of
idleness, these occasions excited her, not with pleasurable
anticipation, but with a nervous fluster that she might somehow miss
something; and the concierge, the porter, Madame, and the head-waiter,
would all be flying about the hotel half an hour before it was necessary
for her to start, sent on some perfectly useless errand connected with
her outing. If it rained, if something went wrong, how she grumbled. And
when she did see her show, it gave her very little pleasure. She had
not in the least a child's mind; she was not pleased by small events,
yet she grasped desperately after them, with an absurd, hazy idea that
she was defrauded of her rights, if she did not see them.
Another interest was an enormous collection of photographs of places,
which she had not cared for at the time, and could not in the least
remember; another her address-book of pensions and hotels, to which she
was always adding new volumes; above all, grumbling. Favourite subjects
were her kettle and her methylated spirits, whether the hotel would
allow her to take up milk and sugar from breakfast, whether the
chambermaid abstracted the biscuits she brought from dessert overnight.
Everyone who came in contact with Miss Symons found they were made to
listen to an endless story of a certain Elise who had stolen the
biscuits and substituted other ones that were quite four days old, and
of Elise's brazen behaviour when charged with the offence.
Her standard of comfort at a hotel was so impossible that she became an
object of terror and dislike to the waiters and chambermaids. She was
punctual in payment, but very grasping, and wrung many concessions from
the hotels by a persistence which no men and few women would have had
the courage to display. She was always seeking the ideal hotel, and for
this reason she was always wandering, and never was long enough in one
place to strike any roots and create a feeling of home. This life
corroded her character. She became more bad-tempered and nagging, always
up in arms, scenting out liberties, and thinking she was taken advantage
of. She was not a character which does well by itself, and under a
domineering manner she concealed her weakness, vacillation, and
timidity. She was divorced from every duty, every responsibility, every
natural tie, with no outlet for her interest or her sympathy. It seems
inconceivable that she should willingly have led such an existence. She
was however, much more satisfied with herself and with things in
general, than she had formerly been. She did not have stormy repentances
or outbursts against her lot; she no longer desired what was
unattainable. If she did not have a particularly high standard of
happiness or of character, neither, in her opinion, had the rest of the
world. Not that she thought much of these things. Over-thinking and
over-longing had caused her much misery in early life, and she shrank
from opening all those wounds again. She faced facts as little as she
could. She lived from day to day, and her inner self was really very
much what her outer self seemed, absorbed in the very small round of
events which concerned her. The days passed, the months passed, the
years passed. She saw them go unregretted, and when they were gone, she
did not remember them. Nothing had happened in them, bad or good, to
mark their course.
"What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in
faculty, in form, in moving how express and admirable, in action how
like an angel, in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the world,
the paragon of animals!"