'But you said your husband was Juchs,' I said.
'So he was,' said Dolly.
'He was? Then why--I'm fearfully slow, I know, but do tell me--if Juchs
was your husband why wasn't he called Siegfried?'
'Because Siegfried's name was Bretterstangel. I _began_ with Siegfried.'
There was a silence. We stood looking at each other, our hands full of
currants.
Then I said, 'Oh.' And after a moment I said, 'I see.' And after another
moment I said, 'You _began_ with Siegfried.'
I was greatly taken aback. The guesses which had been arranged so neatly
in my mind were swept into confusion.
'What you've got to realise,' said Dolly, evidently with an effort, 'is
that I kept on marrying Germans. I ought to have left off at Siegfried.
I wish now I had. But one gets into a habit--'
'But,' I interrupted, my mouth I think rather open, 'you kept on--?'
'Yes,' said Dolly, holding herself very straight and defiantly, 'I did
keep on, and that's what I want you to be quite clear about before we
settle down to stay here indefinitely. Kitty can't stay if I won't. I do
put my foot down sometimes, and I would about this. Poor darling--she
feels desperately what I've done, and I try to help her to keep it quiet
with ordinary people as much as I can--oh, I'm always letting little
bits out! But I can't, I won't, not tell a friend who so wonderfully
invites us--'
'_You're_ not going to begin being grateful?' I interrupted quickly.
'You've no idea,' Dolly answered irrelevantly, her eyes wide with wonder
at her past self, 'how difficult it is not to marry Germans once you've
begun.'
'But--how many?' I got out.
'Oh, only two. It wasn't their number so much. It was their quality.'
'What--Junkers?'
'Junkers? Would you mind more if they had been? Do you mind very much
anyhow?'
'I don't mind anything. I don't mind your being technically German a
scrap. All I think is that it was a little--well, perhaps a little
excessive to marry another German when you had done it once already. But
then I'm always rather on the side of frugality. I do definitely prefer
the few instead of the many and the little instead of the much.'
'In husbands as well?'
'Well yes--I think so.'
Dolly sighed.
'I wish I had been like that,' she said. 'It would have saved poor Kitty
so much.'
She dropped the currants she held in her hands slowly bunch by bunch
into the basket.
'But I don't see,' I said, 'what difference it could make to Kitty. I
mean, once you had started having German husbands at all, what did it
matter one more or less? And wasn't the second one d--I mean, hadn't he
left off being alive when the war began? So I don't see what difference
it could make to Kitty.'
'But that's just what you've got to realise,' said Dolly, letting the
last bunch of currants drop out of her hand into the basket.
She looked at me, and I became aware that she was slowly turning red. A
very delicate flush was slowly spreading over her face, so delicate
that for a moment I didn't see what it was that was making her look more
and more guilty, more and more like a child who has got to confess--but
an honourable, good child, determined that it _will_ confess.
'You know,' she said, 'that I've lived in Germany for years and years.'
'Yes,' I said. 'I've guessed that.'
'And it's different from England.'
'Yes,' I said. 'So I understand.'
'The way they see things. Their laws.'
'Yes,' I said.
Dolly was finding it difficult to say what she had to say. I thought it
might help her if I didn't look at her, so I once more began to pick
currants. She mechanically followed my example.
'Kitty,' she said, as we both stooped busily over the same bush, 'thinks
what I did too dreadful. So did all our English relations. It's because
you may think so too that I've got to tell you. Then you can decide
whether you really want me here or not.'
'Dear Dolly,' I murmured, 'don't please make my blood run cold--'
'Ah, but it's forbidden in the Prayer Book.'
'What is?'
'What I did.'
'_What_ did you do, Dolly?' I asked, now thoroughly uneasy; had her
recklessness gone so far as to lead her to tamper with the Commandments?
Dolly tore off currants and leaves in handfuls and flung them together
into the basket. 'I married my uncle,' she said.
'What?' I said, really astonished.
'Karl--that was my second husband--was Siegfried's--that was my first
husband's--uncle. He was Siegfried's mother's brother--my first
mother-in-law's brother. My second mother-in-law was my first husband's
grandmother. In Germany you can. In Germany you do. But it's forbidden
in the English Prayer Book. It's put in the Table of Kindred and
Affinity that you mustn't. It's number nine of the right-hand
column--Husband's Mother's Brother. And Kitty well, you can guess what
Kitty has felt about it. If it had been my own uncle, my own mother's
brother, she couldn't have been more horrified and heartbroken. I didn't
realise. I didn't think of the effect it might have on them at home. I
just did it. They didn't know till I had done it. I always think it
saves bother to marry first and tell afterwards. I had been so many
years in Germany. It seemed quite natural. I simply stayed on in the
family. It was really habit.'
She threw some currants into the basket, then faced me. 'There,' she
said, looking me straight in the eyes, 'I've told you, and if you think
me impossible I'll go.'
'But--' I began.
Her face was definitely flushed now, and her eyes very bright.
'Oh, I'd be sorry, sorry,' she said impetuously, 'if this ended _us_!'
'Us?'
'You and me. But I couldn't stay here and not tell you, could I. Just
because you may hate it so I had to tell you. You've got a dean in your
family. The Prayer Book is in your blood. And if you do hate it I shall
understand perfectly, and I'll go away and take Kitty and you need never
see or hear of me again, so you musn't mind saying--'
'Oh do wait a minute!' I cried. 'I don't hate it. I don't mind. I'd only
hate it and mind if it was I who had to marry a German uncle. I can't
imagine why anybody should ever want to marry uncles anyhow, but if they
do, and they're not blood-uncles, and it's the custom of the country,
why not? You'll stay here, Dolly. I won't let you go. I don't care if
you've married fifty German uncles. I've loved you from the moment I
saw you on the top of the wall in your funny petticoat. Why, you don't
suppose,' I finished, suddenly magnificently British, 'that I'm going to
let any mere _German_ come between you and me?'
Whereupon we kissed each other,--not once, but several times; fell,
indeed, upon each other's necks. And Antoine, coming to fetch the red
currants for Lisette who had been making signs to him from the steps for
some time past, stood waiting quietly till we should have done.
When he thought we had done he stepped forward and said, '_Pardon,
mesdames_'--and stooping down deftly extracted the basket from between
us.
As he did so his eye rested an instant on the stripped and broken
branches of the currant bush.
He wasn't surprised.
_September 7th._
I couldn't finish about yesterday last night. When I had got as far as
Antoine and the basket I looked at the little clock on my writing-table
and saw to my horror that it was nearly twelve. So I fled into bed; for
what would Mrs. Barnes have said if she had seen me burning the
electric light and doing what she calls trying my eyes at such an hour?
It doesn't matter that they are my eyes and my light: Mrs. Barnes has
become, by virtue of her troubles, the secret standard of my behaviour.
She is like the eye of God to me now,--in every place. And my desire to
please her and make her happy has increased a hundredfold since Dolly
and I have at last, in spite of her precautions, become real friends.
We decided before we left the kitchen-garden yesterday that this was the
important thing: to keep Mrs. Barnes from any hurt that we can avoid.
She has had so many. She will have so many more. I understand now
Dolly's deep sense of all her poor Kitty has given up and endured for
her sake, and I understand the shackles these sacrifices have put on
Dolly. It is a terrible burden to be very much loved. If Dolly were of a
less naturally serene temperament she would go under beneath the weight,
she would be, after five years of it, a colourless, meek thing.
We agreed that Mrs. Barnes musn't know that I know about Dolly's
marriages. Dolly said roundly that it would kill her. Mrs. Barnes
regards her misguided sister as having committed a crime. It is
forbidden in the Prayer Book. She brushes aside the possible Prayer
Books of other countries. Therefore the word German shall never I hope
again escape me while she is here, nor will I talk of husbands, and
perhaps it will be as well to avoid mentioning uncles. Dear me, how very
watchful I shall have to be. For the first time in his life the Dean has
become unmentionable.
I am writing this before breakfast. I haven't seen Dolly alone again
since the kitchen-garden. I don't know how she contrived to appease Mrs.
Barnes and explain her long absence, but that she did contrive it was
evident from the harmonious picture I beheld when, half an hour later, I
too went back to the house. They were sitting together in the sun just
outside the front door knitting. Mrs. Barnes's face was quite contented.
Dolly looked specially radiant. I believe she is made up entirely of
love and laughter--dangerous, endearing ingredients! We just looked at
each other as I came out of the house. It is the most comforting, the
warmest thing, this unexpected finding of a completely understanding
friend.
_September 10th._
Once you have achieved complete understanding with anybody it isn't
necessary, I know, to talk much. I have been told this by the wise.
They have said mere knowledge that the understanding is there is enough.
They have said that perfect understanding needs no expression, that the
perfect intercourse is without words. That may be; but I want to talk.
Not excessively, but sometimes. Speech does add grace and satisfaction
to friendship. It may not be necessary, but it is very agreeable.
As far as I can see I am never, except by the rarest chance, going to
get an opportunity of talking to Dolly alone. And there are so many
things I want to ask her. Were her experiences all pleasant? Or is it
her gay, indomitable spirit that has left her, after them, so entirely
unmarked? Anyhow the last five years can't possibly have been pleasant,
and yet they've not left the shadow of a stain on her serenity. I feel
that she would think very sanely about anything her bright mind touched.
There is something disinfecting about Dolly. I believe she would
disinfect me of the last dregs of morbidness I still may have lurking
inside me.
She and Mrs. Barnes are utterly poor. When the war began Dolly was in
Germany, she told me that morning in the kitchen-garden, and had been a
widow nearly a year. Not Siegfried's widow: Juchs's. I find her
widowhoods confusing.
'Didn't you ever have a child, Dolly?' I asked.
'No,' she said.
'Then how is it you twitched the handkerchief off your sister's sleeping
face that first day and said Peep bo to her so professionally?'
'I used to do that to Siegfried. We were both quite young to begin with,
and played silly games.'
'I see,' I said. 'Go on.'
Juchs had left her some money; just enough to live on. Siegfried hadn't
ever had any, except what he earned as a clerk in a bank, but Juchs had
had some. She hadn't married Juchs for any reason, I gathered, except to
please him. It did please him very much, she said, and I can quite
imagine it. Siegfried too had been pleased in his day. 'I seem to have a
gift for pleasing Germans,' she remarked, smiling. 'They were both very
kind to me. I ended by being very fond of them both. I believe I'd be
fond of anyone who was kind. There's a good deal of the dog about me.'
Directly the war began she packed up and came to Switzerland; she didn't
wish, under such circumstances, to risk pleasing any more Germans.
Since her marriage to Juchs all her English relations except Kitty had
cast her off, so that only a neutral country was open to her, and Kitty
instantly gave up everybody and everything to come and be with her. At
first her little income was sent to her by her German bank, but after
the first few months it sent no more, and she became entirely dependent
on Kitty. All that Kitty had was what she got from selling her house.
The Germans, Dolly said, would send no money out of the country. Though
the war was over she could get nothing out of them unless she went back.
She would never go back. It would kill Kitty; and she too, she thought,
would very likely die. Her career of pleasing Germans does seem to be
definitely over.
'So you see,' she said smiling, 'how wonderful it is for us to have
found _you_.'
'What I can't get over,' I said, 'is having found _you_.'
But I wish, having found her, I might sometimes talk to her.
_September 12th._
We live here in an atmosphere of _combats de générosité_. It is
tremendous. Mrs. Barnes and I are always doing things we don't want to
do because we suppose it is what is going to make the other one happy.
The tyranny of unselfishness! I can hardly breathe.
_September 19th._
I think it isn't good for women to be shut up too long alone together
without a man. They seem to fester. Even the noblest. Taking our
intentions all round they really are quite noble. We do only want to
develope in ideal directions, and remove what we think are the obstacles
to this development in each other's paths; and yet we fester. Not Dolly.
Nothing ever smudges her equable, clear wholesomeness; but there are
moments when I feel as if Mrs. Barnes and I got much mixed up together
in a sort of sticky mass. Faint struggles from time to time, brief
efforts at extrication, show there is still a life in me that is not
flawlessly benevolent, but I repent of them as soon as made because of
the pain and surprise that instantly appear in Mrs. Barnes's tired,
pathetic eyes, and hastily I engulf myself once more in goodness.
That's why I haven't written lately, not for a whole week. It is
glutinous, the prevailing goodness. I have stuck. I have felt as though
my mind were steeped in treacle. Then to-day I remembered my old age,
and the old lady waiting at the end of the years who will want to be
amused, so I've begun again. I have an idea that what will really most
amuse that old lady, that wrinkled philosophical old thing, will be all
the times when I was being uncomfortable. She will be so very
comfortable herself, so done with everything, so entirely an impartial
looker-on, that the rebellions and contortions and woes of the creature
who used to be herself will only make her laugh. She will be blithe in
her security. Besides, she will know the sequel, she will know what came
next, and will see, I daresay, how vain the expense of trouble and
emotions was. So that naturally she will laugh. 'You _silly_ little
thing!' I can imagine her exclaiming, 'If only you had known how it all
wasn't going to matter!' And she will laugh very heartily; for I am sure
she will be a gay old lady.
But what we really want here now is an occasional breath of
brutality,--the passage, infrequent and not too much prolonged, of a
man. If he came to tea once in a way it would do. He would be a blast of
fresh air. He would be like opening a window. We have minced about among
solicitudes and delicacies so very long. I want to smell the rankness
of a pipe, and see the cushions thrown anyhow. I want to see somebody
who doesn't knit. I want to hear Mrs. Barnes being contradicted.
Especially do I want to hear Mrs. Barnes being contradicted ... oh, I'm
afraid I'm still not very good!
_September 20th._
The grapes are ripe down in the vineyards along the edge of the valley,
and this morning I proposed that we should start off early and spend the
day among them doing a grape-cure.
Mrs. Barnes liked the idea very much, and sandwiches were ordered, for
we were not to come back till evening; then at the last moment she
thought it would be too hot in the valley, and that her head, which has
been aching lately, might get worse. The sandwiches were ready on the
hall table. Dolly and I were ready too, boots on and sticks in hand. To
our great surprise Mrs. Barnes, contemplating the sandwiches, said that
as they had been cut they mustn't be wasted, and therefore we had better
go without her.
We were astonished. We were like children being given a holiday. She
kissed us affectionately when we said goodbye, as though, to mark her
trust in us,--in Dolly that she wouldn't tell me the dreadful truth
about herself, in me that I wouldn't encourage her in undesirable points
of view. How safe we were, how deserving of trust, Mrs. Barnes naturally
didn't know. Nothing that either of us could say could possibly upset
the other.
'If Mrs. Barnes knew the worst, knew I knew everything, wouldn't she be
happier?' I asked Dolly as we went briskly down the mountain. 'Wouldn't
at least part of her daily anxiety be got rid of, her daily fear lest I
_should_ get to know?'
'It would kill her,' said Dolly firmly.
'But surely--'
'You mustn't forget that she thinks what I did was a crime.'
'You mean the uncle.'
'Oh, she wouldn't very much mind your knowing about Siegfried. She would
do her utmost to prevent it, because of her horror of Germans and of the
horror she assumes you have of Germans. But once you did know she would
be resigned. The other--' Dolly shook her head. 'It would kill her,' she
said again.
We came to a green slope starred thick with autumn crocuses, and sat
down to look at them. These delicate, lovely things have been appearing
lately on the mountain, at first one by one and then in flocks,--pale
cups of light, lilac on long white stalks that snap off at a touch. Like
the almond trees in the suburban gardens round London that flower when
the winds are cruellest, the autumn crocuses seem too frail to face the
cold nights we are having now; yet it is just when conditions are
growing unkind that they come out. There they are, all over the mountain
fields, flowering in greater profusion the further the month moves
towards winter.
This particular field of them was so beautiful that with one accord
Dolly and I sat down to look. One doesn't pass such beauty by. I think
we sat quite half an hour drinking in those crocuses, and their sunny
plateau, and the way the tops of the pine trees on the slope below stood
out against the blue emptiness of the valley. We were most content. The
sun was so warm, the air of such an extraordinary fresh purity. Just to
breathe was happiness. I think that in my life I have been most blest in
this, that so often just to breathe has been happiness.
Dolly and I, now that we could talk as much as we wanted to, didn't
after all talk much. Suddenly I felt incurious about her Germans. I
didn't want them among the crocuses. The past, both hers and mine,
seemed to matter very little, seemed a stuffy, indifferent thing, in
that clear present. I don't suppose if we hadn't brought an empty basket
with us on purpose to take back grapes to Mrs. Barnes that we would have
gone on down to the vineyards at all, but rather have spent the day just
where we were. The basket, however, had to be filled; it had to be
brought back filled. It was to be the proof that we had done what we
said we would. Kitty, said Dolly, would be fidgeted if we hadn't carried
out the original plan, and might be afraid that, if we weren't eating
grapes all day as arranged, we were probably using our idle mouths for
saying things she wished left unsaid.
'Does poor Kitty _always_ fidget?' I asked.
'Always,' said Dolly.
'About every single thing that might happen?'
'Every single thing,' said Dolly. 'She spends her life now entirely in
fear--and it's all because of me.'
'But really, while she is with me she could have a holiday from fear if
we told her I knew about your uncle and had accepted it with calm.'
'It would kill her,' said Dolly once more, firmly.
We lunched in the vineyards, and our desert was grapes. We ate them for
a long while with enthusiasm, and went on eating them through every
degree of declining pleasure till we disliked them. For fifty centimes
each the owner gave us permission to eat grapes till we died if we
wished to. For another franc we were allowed to fill the basket for Mrs.
Barnes. Only conscientiousness made us fill it full, for we couldn't
believe anybody would really want to eat such things as grapes. Then we
began to crawl up the mountain again, greatly burdened both inside and
out.
It took us over three hours to get home. We carried the basket in turns,
half an hour at a time; but what about those other, invisible, grapes,
that came with us as well? I think people who have been doing a
grape-cure should sit quiet for the rest of the day, or else walk only
on the level. To have to take one's cure up five thousand feet with one
is hard. Again we didn't talk; this time because we couldn't. All that
we could do was to pant and to perspire.
It was a brilliant afternoon, and the way led up when the vineyards left
off through stunted fir trees that gave no shade, along narrow paths
strewn with dry fir needles,--the slipperiest things in the world to
walk on. Through these hot, shadeless trees the sun beat on our bent and
burdened figures. Whenever we stopped to rest and caught sight of each
other's flushed wet faces we laughed.
'Kitty needn't have been afraid we'd _say_ much,' panted Dolly in one of
these pauses, her eyes screwed up with laughter at my melted state.