_August 26th._
All day to-day I have emptied myself of any wishes of my own and tried
to be the perfect hostess. I have given myself up to Mrs. Barnes, and on
the walk I followed where she led, and I made no suggestions when paths
crossed though I have secret passionate preferences in paths, and I
rested on the exact spot she chose in spite of knowing there was a much
prettier one just round the corner, and I joined with her in admiring a
view I didn't really like. In fact I merged myself in Mrs. Barnes,
sitting by her on the mountain side in much the spirit of Wordsworth,
when he sat by his cottage fire without ambition, hope or aim.
_August 27th._
The weather blazes along in its hot beauty. Each morning, the first
thing I see when I open my eyes is the great patch of golden light on
the wall near my bed that means another perfect day. Nearly always the
sky is cloudless--a deep, incredible blue. Once or twice, when I have
gone quite early to my window towards the east, I have seen what looked
to my sleepy eyes like a flock of little angels floating slowly along
the tops of the mountains, or at any rate, if not the angels themselves,
delicate bright tufts of feathers pulled out of their wings. These
objects, on waking up more completely, I have perceived to be clouds;
and then I have thought that perhaps that day there would be rain. But
there never has been rain.
The clouds have floated slowly away to Italy, and left us to another day
of intense, burning heat.
I don't believe the weather will ever break up. Not, anyhow, for a long
time. Not, anyhow, before I have heard Merivale to the end.
_August 28th._
In the morning when I get up and go and look out of my window at the
splendid east I don't care about Merivale. I defy him. And I make up my
mind that though my body may be present at the reading of him so as to
avoid distressing Mrs. Barnes and driving her off the terrace--we are
minute in our care not to drive each other off the terrace--my ears
shall be deaf to him and my imagination shall wander. Who is Merivale,
that he shall burden my memory with even shreds of his unctuous
imitations? And I go down to breakfast with a fortified and shining
spirit, as one who has arisen refreshed and determined from prayer, and
out on the terrace I do shut my ears. But I think there must be chinks
in them, for I find my mind is much hung about, after all, with
Merivale. Bits of him. Bits like this.
_Propertius is deficient in that light touch and exquisitely polished
taste which volatilize the sensuality and flattery of Horace. The
playfulness of the Sabine bard is that of the lapdog, while the Umbrian
reminds us of the pranks of a clumsier and less tolerated quadruped._
This is what you write if you want to write like Gibbon, and yet remain
at the same time a rector and chaplain to the Speaker of the House of
Commons; and this bit kept on repeating itself in my head like a tune
during luncheon to-day. It worried me that I couldn't decide what the
clumsier and less tolerated quadruped was.
'A donkey,' said Mrs. Jewks, on my asking my guests what they thought.
'Surely yes--an ass,' said Mrs. Barnes, whose words are always picked.
'But why should a donkey be less tolerated than a lapdog?' I asked. 'I
would tolerate it more. If I might tolerate only one, it would certainly
be the donkey.'
'Perhaps he means a flea,' suggested Mrs. Jewks.
'Dolly,' said Mrs. Barnes.
'But fleas do go in for pranks, and are less tolerated than lapdogs,'
said Mrs. Jewks.
'Dolly,' said Mrs. Barnes again.
'Except that,' I said, not heeding Mrs. Barnes for a moment in my
pleasure at having got away from the usual luncheon-table talk of food,
'haven't fleas got more than four legs?'
'That's centipedes,' said Dolly.
'Then it's two legs that they've got.'
'That's birds,' said Dolly.
We looked at each other and began to laugh. It was the first time we had
laughed, and once we had begun we laughed and laughed, in that foolish
way one does about completely idiotic things when one knows one oughtn't
to and hasn't for a long while.
There sat Mrs. Barnes, straight and rocky, with worried eyes. She never
smiled; and indeed why should she? But the more she didn't smile the
more we laughed,--helplessly, ridiculously. It was dreadful to laugh,
dreadful to mention objects that distressed her as vulgar; and because
it was dreadful and we knew it was dreadful, we couldn't stop. So was I
once overcome with deplorable laughter in church, only because a cat
came in. So have I seen an ill-starred woman fall a prey to unseasonable
mirth at a wedding. We laughed positively to tears. We couldn't stop. I
did try to. I was really greatly ashamed. For I was doing what I now
feel in all my bones is the thing Mrs. Barnes dreads most,--I was
encouraging Dolly.
Afterwards, when we had settled down to Merivale, and Dolly finding she
had left the book upstairs went in to fetch it, I begged Mrs. Barnes to
believe that I wasn't often quite so silly and didn't suppose I would be
like that again.
She was very kind, and laid her hand for a moment on mine,--such a bony
hand, marked all over, I thought as I looked down at it, with the traces
of devotion and self-sacrifice. That hand had never had leisure to get
fat. It may have had it in the spacious days of Mr. Barnes, but the
years afterwards had certainly been lean ones; and since the war, since
the selling of her house and the beginning of the evidently wearing
occupation of what she had called standing by Dolly, the years, I
understand, have been so lean that they were practically bone.
'I think,' she said, 'I have perhaps got into the way of being too
serious. It is because Dolly, I consider, is not serious enough. If she
were more so I would be less so, and that would be better for us both.
Oh, you musn't suppose,' she added, 'that I cannot enjoy a joke as
merrily as anybody.' And she smiled broadly and amazingly at me, the
rockiest, most determined smile.
'There wasn't any joke, and we were just absurd,' I said penitently, in
my turn laying my hand on hers. 'Forgive me. I'm always sorry and
ashamed when I have behaved as though I were ten. I do try not to, but
sometimes it comes upon one unexpectedly--'
'Dolly is a little old to behave as though she were ten,' said Mrs.
Barnes, in sorrow rather than in anger.
'And I'm a little old too. It's very awkward when you aren't so old
inside as you are outside. For years I've been trying to be dignified,
and I'm always being tripped up by a kind of apparently incurable
natural effervescence.'
Mrs. Barnes looked grave.
'That is what is the matter with Dolly,' she said. 'Just that. How
strange that you should have met. For it isn't usual. I cannot believe
it is usual. All her troubles have been caused by it. I do not, however,
regard it as incurable. On the contrary--I have helped her to check it,
and she is much better than she was.'
'But what are you afraid she will do _now_?' I asked; and Dolly, coming
out with, the book under her arm and that funny little air of jauntiness
that triumphs when she walks over her sobering black skirt and white
cotton petticoat, prevented my getting an answer.
But I felt in great sympathy with Mrs. Barnes. And when, starting for
our walk after tea, something happened to Dolly's boot--I think the heel
came off--and she had to turn back, I gladly went on alone with her
sister, hoping that perhaps she would continue to talk on these more
intimate lines.
And so she did.
'Dolly,' she said almost immediately, almost before we had got round the
turn of the path, 'is the object of my tenderest solicitude and love.'
'I know. I see that,' I said, sympathetically.
'She was the object of my love from the moment when she was laid, a new
born baby, in the arms of the little ten year old girl I was then, and
she became, as she grew up and developed the characteristics I associate
with her name, the object of my solicitude. Indeed, of my concern.'
'I wish,' I said, as she stopped and I began to be afraid this once more
was to be all and the shutters were going to be shut again, 'we might
be real friends.'
'Are we not?' asked Mrs. Barnes, looking anxious, as though she feared
she had failed somewhere in her duties as a guest.
'Oh yes--we are friends of course, but I meant by real friends people
who talk together about anything and everything. _Almost_ anything and
everything,' I amended. 'People who tell each other things,' I went on
hesitatingly. '_Most_ things,' I amended.
'I have a great opinion of discretion,' said Mrs. Barnes.
'I am sure you have. But don't you think that sometimes the very essence
of real friendship consists in--'
'Mr. Barnes always had his own dressing-room.'
This was unexpected, and it silenced me. After a moment I said lamely,
'I'm sure he did. But you were saying about Dol--about Mrs. Jewks--'
'Yes.' Mrs. Barnes sighed. 'Well, it cannot harm you or her,' she went
on after a pause, 'for me to tell you that the first thing Dolly did as
soon as she was grown up was to make an impetuous marriage.'
'Isn't that rather what most of us begin with?'
'Few are so impetuous. Mine, for instance, was not. Mine was the
considered union of affection with regard, entered into properly in the
eye of all men, and accompanied by the good wishes of relations and
friends. Dolly's--well, Dolly's was impetuous. I cannot say
ill-advised, because she asked no one's advice. She plunged--it is not
too strong a word, and unfortunately can be applied to some of her
subsequent movements--into a misalliance, and in order to contract it
she let herself down secretly at night from her bedroom window by means
of a sheet.'
Mrs. Barnes paused.
'How very--how very spirited,' I couldn't help murmuring.
Indeed I believe I felt a little jealous. Nothing in my own past
approaches this in enterprise. And I not only doubted if I would ever
have had the courage to commit myself to a sheet, but I felt a momentary
vexation that no one had ever suggested that on his account I should.
Compared to Dolly, I am a poor thing.
'So you can understand,' continued Mrs. Barnes, 'how earnestly I wish to
keep my sister to lines of normal conduct. She has been much punished
for her departures from them. I am very anxious that nothing should be
said to her that might seem--well, that might seem to be even slightly
in sympathy with actions or ways of looking at life that have in the
past brought her unhappiness, and can only in the future bring her yet
more.'
'But why,' I asked, still thinking of the sheet, 'didn't she go out to
be married through the front door?'
'Because our father would never have allowed his front door to be used
for such a marriage. You forget that it was a school, and she was
running away with somebody who up till a year or two previously had been
one of the pupils.'
'Oh? Did she marry a foreigner?'
Mrs. Barnes flushed a deep, painful red. She is brown and
weather-beaten, yet through the brownness spread unmistakeably this deep
red. Obviously she had forgotten what she told me the other day about
the boys all being foreigners.
'Let us not speak evil of the dead,' she said with awful solemnity; and
for the rest of the walk would talk of nothing but the view.
But in my room to-night I have been thinking. There are guests and
guests, and some guests haunt one. These guests are that kind. They
wouldn't haunt me so much if only we could be really friends; but we'll
never be really friends as long as I am kept from talking to Dolly and
between us is fixed the rugged and hitherto unscaleable barrier of Mrs.
Barnes. Perhaps to-morrow, if I have the courage, I shall make a great
attempt at friendship,--at what Mrs. Barnes would call being thoroughly
indiscreet. For isn't it senseless for us three women, up here alone
together, to spend the precious days when we might be making friends for
life hiding away from each other? Why can't I be told outright that
Dolly married a German? Evidently she did; and if she could bear it I am
sure I can. Twenty years ago it might have happened to us all. Twenty
years ago I might have done it myself, except that there wasn't the
German living who would have got me to go down a sheet for him. And
anyhow Dolly's German is dead; and doesn't even a German leave off being
one after he is dead? Wouldn't he naturally incline, by the sheer action
of time, to dissolve into neutrality? It doesn't seem humane to pursue
him into the recesses of eternity as an alien enemy. Besides, I thought
the war was over.
For a long while to-night I have been leaning out of my window
thinking. When I look at the stars I don't mind about Germans. It seems
impossible to. I believe if Mrs. Barnes would look at them she wouldn't
be nearly so much worried. It is a very good practice, I think, to lean
out of one's window for a space before going to bed and let the cool
darkness wash over one. After being all day with people, how blessed a
thing it is not to be with them. The night to-night is immensely silent,
and I've been standing so quiet, so motionless that I would have heard
the smallest stirring of a leaf. But nothing is stirring. The air is
quite still. There isn't a sound. The mountains seem to be brooding over
a valley that has gone to sleep.
_August 29th._
Antoine said to me this morning that he thought if _ces dames_--so he
always speaks of Mrs. Barnes and Dolly--were going to stay any time,
perhaps an assistant for Mrs. Antoine had better be engaged; because
Mrs. Antoine might otherwise possibly presently begin to find the
combination of heat and visitors a little--
'Of course,' I said. 'Naturally she might. I regret, Antoine, that I did
not think of this. Why did you not point it out sooner? I will go
myself this very day and search for an assistant.'
Antoine said that such exertions were not for Madame, and that it was he
who would search for the assistant.
I said he couldn't possibly leave the chickens and the cow, and that it
was I who would search for the assistant.
So that is what I have been doing all day--having a most heavenly time
wandering from village to village along the mountain side, my knapsack
over my arm and freedom in my heart. The knapsack had food in it and a
volume of Crabbe, because it was impossible to tell how long the search
might last, and I couldn't not be nourished. I explained to my guests
how easily I mightn't be back till the evening, I commended them to the
special attentiveness of the Antoines, and off I went, accompanied by
Mrs. Barnes's commiseration that I should have to be engaged on so hot a
day in what she with felicitous exactness called a domestic pursuit, and
trying very hard not to be too evidently pleased.
I went to the villages that lie in the direction of my lovely place of
larches, and having after some search found the assistant I continued
on towards the west, walking fast, almost as if people would know I had
accomplished what I had come out for, and might catch me and take me
home again.
As I walked it positively was quite difficult not to sing. Only
hostesses know this pure joy. To feel so deep and peculiar an
exhilaration you must have been having guests and still be having them.
Before my guests came I might and did roam about as I chose, but it was
never like to-day, never with that holiday feeling. Oh, I have had a
wonderful day! Everything was delicious. I don't remember having smelt
the woods so good, and there hasn't ever been anything like the deep
cool softness of the grass I lay on at lunch-time. And Crabbe the
delightful,--why don't people talk more about Crabbe? Why don't they
read him more? I have him in eight volumes; none of your little books of
selections, which somehow take away all his true flavour, but every bit
of him from beginning to end. Nobody ever made so many couplets that fit
in to so many occasions of one's life. I believe I could describe my
daily life with Mrs. Barnes and Dolly entirely in couplets from Crabbe.
It is the odd fate of his writings to have turned by the action of time
from serious to droll. He decomposes, as it were, hilariously. I lay
for hours this afternoon enjoying his neat couplets. He enchants me. I
forget time when I am with him. It was Crabbe who made me late for
supper. But he is the last person one takes out for a walk with one if
one isn't happy. Crabbe is a barometer of serenity. You have to be in a
cloudless mood to enjoy him. I was in that mood to-day. I had escaped.
Well, I have had my outing, I have had my little break, and have come
back filled with renewed zeal to my guests. When I said good-night
to-night I was so much pleased with everything, and felt so happily and
comfortably affectionate, that I not only kissed Dolly but embarked
adventurously on an embrace of Mrs. Barnes.
She received it with surprise but kindliness.