To stay? The elder, engaged in buttoning her tight kid gloves, said it
was most kind of me, but they couldn't possibly stay any longer. It was
far too late already, owing to their so unfortunately having gone to
sleep--
'I mean stay the night,' I said; and explained that it would be doing me
a kindness, and because of that they must please overlook anything in
such an invitation that might appear unconventional, for certainly if
they did set out I should lie awake all night thinking of them lost
somewhere among the precipices, or perhaps fallen over one, and how much
better to go down comfortably in daylight, and I could lend them
everything they wanted, including a great many new toothbrushes I found
here,--in short, I not only invited, I pressed; growing more eager by
the sheer gathering momentum of my speech.
All day, while the elder talked and I listened, I had secretly felt
uneasy. Here was I, one woman in a house arranged for family gatherings,
while they for want of rooms were forced to swelter in the valley.
Gradually, as I listened, my uneasiness increased. Presently I began to
feel guilty. And at last, as I watched them sleeping in such exhaustion
on the sofa, I felt at the bottom of my heart somehow responsible. But
I don't know, of course, that it is wise to invite strangers to stay
with one.
They accepted gratefully. The moment the elder understood what it was
that my eager words were pressing on her, she drew the pins out of her
toque and laid it on the chair again; and so did the other one, smiling
at me.
When the Antoines came home I went out to meet them. By that time my
guests were shut up in their bedrooms with new toothbrushes. They had
gone up very early, both of them so stiff that they could hardly walk.
Till they did go up, what moments I had been able to spare from my hasty
preparations for their comfort had been filled entirely, as earlier in
the day, by the elder one's gratitude; there had still been no chance of
real talk.
'_J'ai des visites_,' I said to the Antoines, going out to meet them
when, through the silence of the evening, I heard their steps coming up
the path.
Antoine wasn't surprised. He just said, '_Ca sera comme autrefois_,' and
began to shut the shutters.
But I am. I can't go to bed, I'm so much surprised. I've been sitting
up here scribbling when I ought to have been in bed long ago. Who would
have thought that the day that began so emptily would end with two of my
rooms full,--each containing a widow? For they are widows, they told me:
widows who have lost their husbands by peaceful methods, nothing to do
with the war. Their names are Mrs. Barnes and Mrs. Jewks,--at least that
is what the younger one's sounded like; I don't know if I have spelt it
right. They come from Dulwich. I think the elder one had a slight
misgiving at the last, and seemed to remember what was due to the Lord
Mayor, when she found herself going to bed in a strange house belonging
to somebody of whom she knew nothing; for she remarked a little
doubtfully, and with rather a defensive eye fixed on me, that the war
had broken down many barriers, and that people did things now that they
wouldn't have dreamed of doing five years ago.
The other one didn't say nothing, but actually kissed me. I hope she
wasn't again mistaking me for Siegfried.
_August 15th_
My guests have gone again, but only to fetch their things and pay their
hotel bill, and then they are coming back to stay with me till it is a
little cooler. They are coming back to-morrow, not to-day. They are
entangled in some arrangement with their pension that makes it difficult
for them to leave at once.
Mrs. Barnes appeared at breakfast with any misgivings she may have had
last night gone, for when I suggested they should spend this hot weather
up here she immediately accepted. I hadn't slept for thinking of them.
How could I possibly not ask them to stay, seeing their discomfort and
my roominess? Towards morning it was finally clear to me that it wasn't
possible: I would ask them. Though, remembering the look in Mrs.
Barnes's eye the last thing last night, I couldn't be sure she would
accept. She might want to find out about me first, after the cautious
and hampering way of women,--oh, I wish women wouldn't always be so
cautious, but simply get on with their friendships! She might first want
assurances that there was some good reason for my being here all by
myself. Alas, there isn't a good reason; there is only a bad one. But,
fortunately, to be alone is generally regarded as respectable, in spite
of what Seneca says a philosopher said to a young man he saw walking by
himself: 'Have a care,' said he, 'of lewd company.'
However, I don't suppose Mrs. Barnes knew about Seneca. Anyhow she
didn't hesitate. She accepted at once, and said that under these
circumstances it was certainly due to me to tell me a little about
themselves.
At this I got my dean ready to meet the Lord Mayor, but after all I was
told nothing more than that my guests are sisters; for at this point,
very soon arrived at, the younger one, Mrs. Jewks, who had slipped away
on our getting up from breakfast, reappeared with the toques and gloves,
and said she thought they had better start before it got any hotter.
So they went, and the long day here has been most beautiful--so
peaceful, so quiet, with the delicate mountains like opals against the
afternoon sky, and the shadows lengthening along the valley.
I don't feel to-day as I did yesterday, that I want to talk. To-day I am
content with things exactly as they are: the sun, the silence, the
caresses of the funny little white kitten with the smudge of black round
its left eye that makes it look as though it must be somebody's wife,
and the pleasant knowledge that my new friends are coming back again.
I think that knowledge makes to-day more precious. It is the last day
for some time, for at least a week judging from the look of the blazing
sky, of what I see now that they are ending have been wonderful days. Up
the ladder of these days I have climbed slowly away from the blackness
at the bottom. It has been like finding some steps under water just as
one was drowning, and crawling up them to air and light. But now that I
have got at least most of myself back to air and light, and feel hopeful
of not slipping down again, it is surely time to arise, shake myself,
and begin to do something active and fruitful. And behold, just as I
realise this, just as I realise that I am, so to speak, ripe for
fruit-bearing, there appear on the scene Mrs. Barnes and Mrs. Jewks, as
it were the midwives of Providence.
Well, that shall be to-morrow. Meanwhile there is still to-day, and each
one of its quiet hours seems very precious. I wonder what my new friends
like to read. Suppose--I was going to say suppose it is _The Rosary_;
but I won't suppose that, for when it comes to supposing, why not
suppose something that isn't _The Rosary_? Why not, for instance,
suppose they like _Eminent Victorians_, and that we three are going to
sit of an evening delicately tickling each other with quotations from
it, and gently squirming in our seats for pleasure? It is just as easy
to suppose that as to suppose anything else, and as I'm not yet
acquainted with these ladies' tastes one supposition is as likely to be
right as another.
I don't know, though--I forgot their petticoats. I can't believe any
friends of Mr. Lytton Strachey wear that kind of petticoat, eminently
Victorian even though it be; and although he wouldn't, of course, have
direct ocular proof that they did unless he had stood with me yesterday
at the bottom of that wall while they on the top held up their skirts,
still what one has on underneath does somehow ooze through into one's
behaviour. I know once, when impelled by a heat wave in America to cast
aside the undergarments of a candid mind and buy and put on pink
chiffon, the pink chiffon instantly got through all my clothes into my
conduct, which became curiously dashing. Anybody can tell what a woman
has got on underneath by merely watching her behaviour. I have known
just the consciousness of silk stockings, worn by one accustomed only to
wool, produce dictatorialness where all before had been submission.
_August 19th_
I haven't written for three days because I have been so busy settling
down to my guests.
They call each other Kitty and Dolly. They explained that these were
inevitably their names because they were born, one fifty, the other
forty years ago. I inquired why this was inevitable, and they drew my
attention to fashions in names, asserting that people's ages could
generally be guessed by their Christian names. If, they said, their
birth had taken place ten years earlier they would have been Ethel and
Maud; if ten years later they would have been Muriel and Gladys; and if
twenty years only ago they had no doubt but what they would have been
Elizabeth and Pamela. It is always Mrs. Barnes who talks; but the effect
is as though they together were telling me things, because of the way
Mrs. Jewks smiles,--I conclude in agreement.
'Our dear parents, both long since dead,' said Mrs. Barnes, adjusting
her eyeglasses more comfortably on her nose, 'didn't seem to remember
that we would ever grow old, for we weren't even christened Katharine
and Dorothy, to which we might have reverted when we ceased being girls,
but we were Kitty and Dolly from the very beginning, and actually in
that condition came away from the font.'
'I like being Dolly,' murmured Mrs. Jewks.
Mrs. Barnes looked at her with what I thought was a slight uneasiness,
and rebuked her. 'You shouldn't,' she said. 'After thirty-nine no woman
should willingly be Dolly.'
'I still feel exactly _like_ Dolly,' murmured Mrs. Jewks.
'It's a misfortune,' said Mrs. Barnes, shaking her head. 'To be called
Dolly after a certain age is bad enough, but it is far worse to feel
like it. What I think of,' she said, turning to me, 'is when we are
really old,--in bath chairs, unable to walk, and no doubt being spoon
fed, and yet obliged to continue to be called by these names. It will
rob us of dignity.'
'I don't think I'll mind,' murmured Mrs. Jewks. 'I shall still feel
exactly _like_ Dolly.'
Mrs. Barnes looked at her, again I thought with uneasiness--with,
really, an air of rather anxious responsibility.
And afterwards, when her sister had gone indoors for something, she
expounded a theory she said she held, the soundness of which had often
been proved to her by events, that names had much influence on
behaviour.
'Not half as much,' I thought (but didn't say), 'as underclothes.' And
indeed I have for years been acquainted with somebody called Trixy, who
for steady gloom and heaviness of spirit would be hard to equal. Also I
know an Isolda; a most respectable married woman, of a sprightly humour
and much nimbleness in dodging big emotions.
'Dolly,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'has never, I am sorry to say, shared my
opinion. If she had, many things in her life would have been different,
for then she would have been on her guard as I have been. I am glad to
say there is nothing I have ever done since I ceased to be a child that
has been even remotely compatible with being called Kitty.'
I said I thought that was a great deal to be able to say. It suggested,
I said, quite an unusually blameless past. Through my brain ran for an
instant the vision of that devil who, seeking his tail, met Antoine in
the passage. I blushed. Fortunately Mrs. Barnes didn't notice.
'What did Dol--what did Mrs. Jewks do,' I said, 'that you think was the
direct result of her Christian name? Don't tell me if my question is
indiscreet, which I daresay it is, because I know I often am, but your
theory interests me.'
Mrs. Barnes hesitated a moment. She was, I think, turning over in her
mind whether she would give herself the relief of complete unreserve, or
continue for a few more days to skim round on the outskirts of
confidences. This was yesterday. After all, she had only been with me
two days.
She considered awhile, then decided that two days wasn't long enough, so
only said: 'My sister is sometimes a little rash,--or perhaps I should
say has been. But the effects of rashness are felt for a long time;
usually for the rest of one's life.'
'Yes,' I agreed; and thought ruefully of some of my own.
This, however, only made me if anything more inquisitive as to the exact
nature and quality of Dolly's resemblance to her name. We all, I suppose
(except Mrs. Barnes, who I am sure hasn't), have been rash, and if we
could induce ourselves to be frank much innocent amusement might be got
by comparing the results of our rashnesses. But Mrs. Barnes was unable
at the moment to induce herself to be frank, and she returned to the
subject she has already treated very fully since her arrival, the
wonderful bracing air up here and her great and grateful appreciation of
it.
To-day is Tuesday; and on Saturday evening,--the day they arrived back
again, complete with their luggage, which came up in a cart round by the
endless zigzags of the road while they with their peculiar dauntlessness
took the steep short cuts,--we had what might be called an exchange of
cards. Mrs. Barnes told me what she thought fit for me to know about her
late husband, and I responded by telling her and her sister what I
thought fit for them to know of my uncle the Dean.
There is such a lot of him that is fit to know that it took some time.
He was a great convenience. How glad I am I've got him. A dean, after
all, is of an impressive respectability as a relation. His apron covers
a multitude of family shortcomings. You can hold him up to the light,
and turn him round, and view him from every angle, and there is nothing
about him that doesn't bear inspection. All my relations aren't like
that. One at least, though he denies it, wasn't even born in wedlock.
We're not sure about the others, but we're quite sure about this one,
that he wasn't born altogether as he ought to have been. Except for his
obstinacy in denial he is a very attractive person. My uncle can't be
got to see that he exists. This makes him not able to like my uncle.
I didn't go beyond the Dean on Saturday night, for he had a most
satisfying effect on my new friends. Mrs. Barnes evidently thinks highly
of deans, and Mrs. Jewks, though she said nothing, smiled very
pleasantly while I held him up to view. No Lord Mayor was produced on
their side. I begin to think there isn't one. I begin to think their
self-respect is simply due to the consciousness that they are British.
Not that Mrs. Jewks says anything about it, but she smiles while Mrs.
Barnes talks on immensely patriotic lines. I gather they haven't been in
England for some time, so that naturally their affection for their
country has been fanned into a great glow. I know all about that sort of
glow. I have had it each time I've been out of England.
_August 20th._
Mrs. Barnes elaborated the story of him she speaks of always as Mr.
Barnes to-day.
He was, she said, a business man, and went to the city every day, where
he did things with hides: dried skins, I understood, that he bought and
resold. And though Mr. Barnes drew his sustenance from these hides with
what seemed to Mrs. Barnes great ease and abundance while he was alive,
after his death it was found that, through no fault of his own but
rather, she suggested, to his credit, he had for some time past been
living on his capital. This capital came to an end almost simultaneously
with Mr. Barnes, and all that was left for Mrs. Barnes to live on was
the house at Dulwich, handsomely furnished, it was true, with everything
of the best; for Mr. Barnes had disliked what Mrs. Barnes called
fandangles, and was all for mahogany and keeping a good table. But you
can't live on mahogany, said Mrs. Barnes, nor keep a good table with
nothing to keep it on, so she wished to sell the house and retire into
obscurity on the proceeds. Her brother-in-law, however, suggested paying
guests; so would she be able to continue in her home, even if on a
slightly different basis. Many people at that period were beginning to
take in paying guests. She would not, he thought, lose caste. Especially
if she restricted herself to real gentlefolk, who wouldn't allow her to
feel her position.
It was a little difficult at first, but she got used to it and was
doing very well when the war broke out. Then, of course, she had to
stand by Dolly. So she gave up her house and guests, and her means were
now very small; for somehow, remarked Mrs. Barnes, directly one wants to
sell nobody seems to want to buy, and she had had to let her beautiful
house go for very little--
'But why--' I interrupted; and pulled myself up.
I was just going to ask why Dolly hadn't gone to Mrs. Barnes and helped
with the paying guests, instead of Mrs. Barnes giving them up and going
to Dolly; but I stopped because I thought perhaps such a question,
seeing that they quite remarkably refrain from asking me questions,
might have been a little indiscreet at our present stage of intimacy.
No, I can't call it intimacy,--friendship, then. No, I can't call it
friendship either, yet; the only word at present is acquaintanceship.
_August 21st._
The conduct of my guests is so extraordinarily discreet, their careful
avoidance of curiosity, of questions, is so remarkable, that I can but
try to imitate. They haven't asked me a single thing. I positively
thrust the Dean on them. They make no comment on anything either,
except the situation and the view. We seem to talk if not only certainly
chiefly about that. We haven't even got to books yet. I still don't know
about _The Rosary_. Once or twice when I have been alone with Mrs.
Barnes she has begun to talk of Dolly, who appears to fill most of her
thoughts, but each time she has broken off in the middle and resumed her
praises of the situation and the view. I haven't been alone at all yet
with Dolly; nor, though Mr. Barnes has been dwelt upon in detail, have I
been told anything about Mr. Jewks.
_August 22nd._
Impetuosity sometimes gets the better of me, and out begins to rush a
question; but up to now I have succeeded in catching it and strangling
it before it is complete. For perhaps my new friends have been very
unhappy, just as I have been very unhappy, and they may be struggling
out of it just as I am, still with places in their memories that hurt
too much for them to dare to touch. Perhaps it is only by silence and
reserve that they can manage to be brave.
There are no signs, though, of anything of the sort on their composed
faces; but then neither, I think, would they see any signs of such
things on mine. The moment as it passes is, I find, somehow a gay thing.
Somebody says something amusing, and I laugh; somebody is kind, and I am
happy. Just the smell of a flower, the turn of a sentence, anything, the
littlest thing, is enough to make the passing moment gay to me. I am
sure my guests can't tell by looking at me that I have ever been
anything but cheerful; and so I, by looking at them, wouldn't be able to
say that they have ever been anything but composed,--Mrs. Barnes
composed and grave, Mrs. Jewks composed and smiling.
But I refuse now to jump at conclusions in the nimble way I used to.
Even about Mrs. Barnes, who would seem to be an untouched monument of
tranquillity, a cave of calm memories, I can no longer be sure. And so
we sit together quietly on the terrace, and are as presentable as so
many tidy, white-curtained houses in a decent street. We don't know what
we've got inside us each of disorder, of discomfort, of anxieties.
Perhaps there is nothing; perhaps my friends are as tidy and quiet
inside as out. Anyhow up to now we have kept ourselves to ourselves, as
Mrs. Barnes would say, and we make a most creditable show.
Only I don't believe in that keeping oneself to oneself attitude. Life
is too brief to waste any of it being slow in making friends. I have a
theory--Mrs. Barnes isn't the only one of us three who has
theories--that reticence is a stuffy, hampering thing. Except about
one's extremest bitter grief, which is, like one's extremest joy of
love, too deeply hidden away with God to be told of, one should be
without reserves. And if one makes mistakes, and if the other person
turns out to have been unworthy of being treated frankly and goes away
and distorts, it can't be helped,--one just takes the risk. For isn't
anything better than distrust, and the slowness and selfish fear of
caution? Isn't anything better than not doing one's fellow creatures the
honour of taking it for granted that they are, women and all, gentlemen?
Besides, how lonely....
_August 23rd._
The sun goes on blazing, and we go on sitting in the shade in a row.
Mrs. Barnes does a great deal of knitting. She knits socks for soldiers
all day. She got into this habit during the war, when she sent I don't
know how many pairs a year to the trenches, and now she can't stop. I
suppose these will go to charitable institutions, for although the war
has left off there are, as Mrs. Jewks justly said, still legs in the
world.
This remark I think came under the heading Dolly in Mrs. Barnes's mind,
for she let her glance rest a moment on her sister in a kind of
affectionate concern.
Mrs. Jewks hasn't said much yet, but each time she has said anything I
have liked it. Usually she murmurs, almost as if she didn't want Mrs.
Barnes to hear, yet couldn't help saying what she says. She too knits,
but only, I think, because her sister likes to see her sitting beside
her doing it, and never for long at a time. Her chief occupation, I have
discovered, is to read aloud to Mrs. Barnes.
This wasn't done in my presence the first four days out of consideration
for me, for everybody doesn't like being read to, Mrs. Barnes explained
afterwards; but they went upstairs after lunch to their rooms,--to
sleep, as I supposed, knowing how well they do that, and it was only
gradually that I realised, from the monotonous gentle drone coming
through the window to where I lay below on the grass, that it wasn't
Mrs. Barnes giving long drawn-out counsel to Mrs. Jewks on the best way
to cope with the dangers of being Dolly, but that it was Mrs. Jewks
reading aloud.
After that I suggested they should do this on the terrace, where it is
so much cooler than anywhere else in the afternoon; so now, reassured
that it in no way disturbs me--Mrs. Barnes's politeness and sense of
duty as a guest never flags for a moment--this is what happens, and it
happens in the mornings also. For, says Mrs. Barnes, how much better it
is to study what persons of note have said than waste the hours of life
saying things oneself.
They read biographies and histories, but only those, I gather, that are
not recent; and sometimes, Mrs. Barnes said, they lighten what Mrs.
Jewks described in a murmur as these more solid forms of fiction by
reading a really good novel.
I asked Mrs. Barnes with much interest about the novel. What were the
really good ones they had read? And I hung on the answer, for here was
something we could talk about that wasn't either the situation or the
view and yet was discreet.
'Ah,' she said, shaking her head, 'there are very few really good
novels. We don't care, of course, except for the very best, and they
don't appear to be printed nowadays.'
'I expect the very best are unprintable,' murmured Mrs. Jewks, her head
bent over her knitting, for it was one of the moments when she too was
engaged on socks.
'There used to be very good novels,' continued Mrs. Barnes, who hadn't I
think heard her, 'but of recent years they have indeed been few. I begin
to fear we shall never again see a Thackeray or a Trollope. And yet I
have a theory--and surely these two writers prove it--that it is
possible to be both wholesome and clever.'
'I don't want to see any more Thackerays and Trollopes,' murmured Mrs.
Jewks. 'I've seen them. Now I want to see something different.'
This sentence was too long for Mrs. Barnes not to notice, and she looked
at me as one who should say, 'There. What did I tell you? Her name
unsettles her.'
There was a silence.
'Our father,' then said Mrs. Barnes, with so great a gravity of tone
that for a moment I thought she was unaccountably and at eleven o'clock
in the morning going to embark on the Lord's Prayer, 'knew Thackeray. He
mixed with him.'
And as I wasn't quite sure whether this was a rebuke for Dolly or
information for me, I kept quiet.
As, however, Mrs. Barnes didn't continue, I began to feel that perhaps I
was expected to say something. So I did.
'That,' I said, 'must have been very--'
I searched round for an enthusiastic word, but couldn't find one. It is
unfortunate how I can never think of any words more enthusiastic than
what I am feeling. They seem to disappear; and urged by politeness, or a
desire to please, I frantically hunt for them in a perfectly empty mind.
The nearest approach to one that I found this morning was Enjoyable. I
don't think much of Enjoyable. It is a watery word; but it was all I
found, so I said it. 'That must have been very enjoyable,' I said; and
even I could hear that my voice was without excitement.
Mrs. Jewks looked at me and smiled.
'It was more than enjoyable,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'it was elevating. Dolly
used to feel just as I do about it,' she added, her eye reproachfully on
her sister. 'It is not Thackeray's fault that she no longer does.'
'It's only because I've finished with him,' said Mrs. Jewks
apologetically. 'Now I want something _different_.'
'Dolly and I,' explained Mrs. Barnes to me, 'don't always see alike. I
have a theory that one doesn't finish with the Immortals.'
'Would you put Thackeray--' I began diffidently.
Mrs. Barnes stopped me at once.
'Our father,' she said--again my hands instinctively wanted to
fold--'who was an excellent judge, indeed a specialist if I may say so,
placed him among the Immortals. Therefore I am content to leave him
there.'
'But isn't that filial piety rather than--' I began again, still
diffident but also obstinate.
'In any case,' interrupted Mrs. Barnes, raising her hand as though I
were the traffic, 'I shall never forget the influence he and the other
great writers of the period had upon the boys.'
'The boys?' I couldn't help inquiring, in spite of this being an
interrogation.
'Our father educated boys. On an unusual and original system. Being
devoid of the classics, which he said was all the better because then he
hadn't to spend any time remembering them, he was a devoted English
linguist. Accordingly he taught boys English,--foreign boys, because
English boys naturally know it already, and his method was to make them
minutely acquainted with the great novels,--the great wholesome novels
of that period. Not a French, or Dutch, or Italian boy but went home--'
'Or German,' put in Mrs. Jewks. 'Most of them were Germans.'
Mrs. Barnes turned red. 'Let us forget them,' she said, with a wave of
her hand. 'It is my earnest desire,' she continued, looking at me, 'to
forget Germans.'
'Do let us,' I said politely.
'Not one of the boys,' she then went on, 'but returned to his country
with a knowledge of the colloquial English of the best period, and of
the noble views of that period as expressed by the noblest men,
unobtainable by any other method. Our father called himself a
Non-Grammarian. The boys went home knowing no rules of grammar, yet
unable to talk incorrectly. Thackeray himself was the grammar, and his
characters the teachers. And so was Dickens, but not quite to the same
extent, because of people like Sam Weller who might have taught the boys
slang. Thackeray was immensely interested when our father wrote and told
him about the school, and once when he was in London he invited him to
lunch.'
Not quite clear as to who was in London and which invited which, I said,
'Who?'
'It was our father who went to London,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'and was most
kindly entertained by Thackeray.'
'He went because he wasn't there already,' explained Mrs. Jewks.
'Dolly means,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'that he did not live in London. Our
father was an Oxford man. Not in the narrow, technical meaning that has
come to be attached to the term, but in the simple natural sense of
living there. It was there that we were born, and there that we grew up
in an atmosphere of education. We saw it all round us going on in the
different colleges, and we saw it in detail and at first hand in our own
home. For we too were brought up on Thackeray and Dickens, in whom our
father said we would find everything girls needed to know and nothing
that, they had better not.'
'I used to have a perfect _itch_,' murmured Mrs. Jewks, 'to know the
things I had better not.'
And Mrs. Barnes again looked at me as one who should say, 'There. What
did I tell you? Such a word, too. Itch.'
There was a silence. I could think of nothing to say that wouldn't
appear either inquisitive or to be encouraging Dolly.
Mrs. Barnes sits between us. This arrangement of our chairs on the grass
happened apparently quite naturally the first day, and now has become
one that I feel I mustn't disturb. For me to drop into the middle chair
would somehow now be impossible. It is Mrs. Barnes's place. Yet I do
want to sit next to Mrs. Jewks and talk to her. Or better still, go for
a walk with her. But Mrs. Barnes always goes for the walks, either with
or without me, but never without Mrs. Jewks. She hasn't yet left us once
alone together. If anything needs fetching it is Mrs. Jewks who fetches
it. They don't seem to want to write letters, but if they did I expect
they would both go in to write them at the same time.
I do think, though, that we are growing a little more intimate. At least
to-day we have talked of something that wasn't the view. I shouldn't be
surprised if in another week, supposing the hot weather lasts so long, I
shall be asking Mrs. Barnes outright what it is Dolly did that has
apparently so permanently unnerved her sister.
But suppose she retaliated by asking me,--oh, there are so many things
she could ask me that I couldn't answer! Except with the shameful,
exposing answer of beginning very helplessly to cry....
_August 24th._
Last night I ran after Mrs. Jewks just as she was disappearing into her
room and said, 'I'm going to call you Dolly. I don't like Jewks. How do
you spell it?'
'What--Dolly?' she asked, smiling.
'No--Jewks.'
But Mrs. Barnes came out of her bedroom and said, 'Did we forget to bid
you goodnight? How very remiss of us.'
And we all smiled at each other, and went into our rooms, and shut the
doors.
_August 25th._
The behaviour of time is a surprising thing. I can't think how it
manages to make weeks sometimes seem like minutes and days sometimes
seem like years. Those weeks I was here alone seemed not longer than a
few minutes. These days since my guests came seem to have gone on for
months.
I suppose it is because they have been so tightly packed. Nobody coming
up the path and seeing the three figures sitting quietly on the terrace,
the middle one knitting, the right-hand one reading aloud, the
left-hand one sunk apparently in stupor, would guess that these
creatures' days were packed. Many an honest slug stirred by creditable
desires has looked more animate than we. Yet the days _are_ packed.
Mine, at any rate, are. Packed tight with an immense monotony.
Every day we do exactly the same things: breakfast, read aloud; lunch,
read aloud; tea, go for a walk; supper, read aloud; exhaustion; bed. How
quick and short it is to write down, and how endless to live. At meals
we talk, and on the walk we talk, or rather we say things. At meals the
things we say are about food, and on the walk they are about mountains.
The rest of the time we don't talk, because of the reading aloud. That
fills up every gap; that muzzles all conversation.
I don't know whether Mrs. Barnes is afraid I'll ask questions, or
whether she is afraid Dolly will start answering questions that I
haven't asked; I only know that she seems to have decided that safety
lies in putting an extinguisher on talk. At the same time she is most
earnest in her endeavours to be an agreeable guest, and is all
politeness; but so am I, most earnest for my part in my desire to be an
agreeable hostess, and we are both so dreadfully polite and so horribly
considerate that things end by being exactly as I would prefer them not
to be.
For instance, finding Merivale--it is Merivale's _History of the Romans
under the Empire_ that is being read--finding him too much like Gibbon
gone sick and filled with water, a Gibbon with all the kick taken out of
him, shorn of his virility and his foot-notes, yesterday I didn't go and
sit on the terrace after breakfast, but took a volume of the authentic
Gibbon and departed by the back door for a walk.
It is usually, I know, a bad sign when a hostess begins to use the back
door, but it wasn't a sign of anything in this case except a great
desire to get away from Merivale. After lunch, when, strengthened by my
morning, I prepared to listen to some more of him, I found the chairs on
the terrace empty, and from the window of Mrs. Barnes's room floated
down the familiar muffled drone of the first four days.
So then I went for another walk, and thought. And the result was polite
affectionate protests at tea-time, decorated with some amiable untruths
about domestic affairs having called me away--God forgive me, but I
believe I said it was the laundress--and such real distress on Mrs.
Barnes's part at the thought of having driven me off my own terrace,
that now so as to shield her from thinking anything so painful to her I
must needs hear Merivale to the end.
'Dolly,' I said, meeting her by some strange chance alone on the stairs
going down to supper--invariably the sisters go down together--'do you
like reading aloud?'
I said it very quickly and under my breath, for at the bottom of the
stairs would certainly be Mrs. Barnes.
'No,' she said, also under her breath.
'Then why do you do it?'
'Do you like listening?' she whispered, smiling.
'No,' I said.
'Then why do you do it?'
'Because--' I said. 'Well, because--'