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.