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._