West Belvern, Holly House
August 189-.
I am here alone. Salemina has taken her little cloth bag and her
notebook and gone to inspect the educational and industrial methods of
Germany. If she can discover anything that they are not already doing
better in Boston, she will take it back with her, but her state of
mind regarding the outcome of the trip might be described as one of
incredulity tinged with hope. Francesca has accompanied Salemina. Not
that the inspection of systems is much in her line, but she prefers
it to a solitude a deux with me when I am in a working mood, and she
comforts herself with the anticipation that the German army is very
attractive. Willie Beresford has gone with his mother to Aix-les-Bains,
like the dutiful son that he is. They say that a good son makes a good--
But that subject is dismissed to the background for the present, for
we are in a state of armed neutrality. He has agreed to wait until the
autumn for a final answer, and I have promised to furnish one by that
time. Meanwhile, we are to continue our acquaintance by post, which is a
concession I would never have allowed if I had had my wits about me.
After paying my last week's bill in Dovermarle Street, including fees
to several servants whom I knew by sight, and several others whose
acquaintance I made for the first time at the moment of departure,
I glanced at my ebbing letter of credit and felt a season of economy
setting in upon me with unusual severity; accordingly, I made an
experiment of coming third-class to Belvern. I handed the guard a
shilling, and he gave me a seat riding backwards in a carriage with
seven other women, all very frumpish, but highly respectable. As
he could not possibly have done any worse for me, I take it that he
considered the shilling a graceful tribute to his personal charms,
but as having no other bearing whatever. The seven women stared at me
throughout the journey. When one is really of the same blood, and
when one does not open one's lips or wave the stars and stripes in any
possible manner, how do they detect the American? These women looked
at me as if I were a highly interesting anthropoidal ape. It was not
because of my attire, for I was carefully dressed down to a third-class
level; yet when I removed my plain Knox hat and leaned my head
back against my travelling-pillow, an electrical shudder of intense
excitement ran through the entire compartment. When I stooped to tie my
shoe another current was set in motion, and when I took Charles Reade's
White Lies from my portmanteau they glanced at one another as if to say,
'Would that we could see in what language the book is written!' As a
travelling mystery I reached my highest point at Oxford, for there I
purchased a small basket of plums from a boy who handed them in at the
window of the carriage. After eating a few, I offered the rest to a
dowdy elderly woman on my left who was munching dry biscuits from a
paper bag. 'What next?' was the facial expression of the entire company.
My neighbour accepted the plums, but hid them in her bag; plainly
thinking them poisoned, and believing me to be a foreign conspirator,
conspiring against England through the medium of her inoffensive person.
In the course of the four-hours' journey, I could account for the
strange impression I was making only upon the theory that it is unusual
to comport oneself in a first-class manner in a third-class carriage.
All my companions chanced to be third-class by birth as well as by
ticket, and the Englishwoman who is born third-class is sometimes
deficient in imagination.
Upon arriving at Great Belvern (which must be pronounced 'Bevern') I
took a trap, had my luggage put on in front, and start on my quest for
lodgings in West Belvern, five miles distant. Several addresses had been
given me by Hilda Mellifica, who has spent much time in this region, and
who begged me to use her name. I told the driver that I wished to find
a clean, comfortable lodging, with the view mentioned in the guide-book,
and with a purple clematis over the door, if possible. The last point
astounded him to such a degree that he had, I think, a serious idea of
giving me into custody. (I should not be so eccentrically spontaneous
with these people, if they did not feed my sense of humour by their
amazement.)
We visited Holly House, Osborne, St. James, Victoria, and Albert houses,
Tank Villa, Poplar Villa, Rose, Brake, and Thorn Villas, as well as
Hawthorn, Gorse, Fern, Shrubbery, and Providence Cottages. All had
apartments, but many were taken, and many more had rooms either dark
and stuffy or without view. Holly House was my first stopping-place. Why
will a woman voluntarily call her place by a name which she can never
pronounce? It is my landlady's misfortune that she is named 'Obbs, and
mine that I am called 'Amilton, but Mrs. 'Obbs must have rushed with
eyes wide open on 'Olly 'Ouse. I found sitting-room and bedroom at Holly
House for two guineas a week; everything, except roof, extra. This
was more than, in my new spirit of economy I desired to pay, but after
exhausting my list I was obliged to go back rather than sleep in the
highroad. Mrs. Hobbs offered to deduct two shillings a week if I stayed
until Christmas, and said she should not charge me a penny for the
linen. Thanking her with tears of gratitude, I requested dinner. There
was no meat in the house, so I supped frugally off two boiled eggs,
a stodgy household loaf, and a mug of ale, after which I climbed the
stairs, and retired to my feather-bed in a rather depressed frame of
mind.
Visions of Salemina and Francesca driving under the linden-trees in
Berlin flitted across my troubled reveries, with glimpses of Willie
Beresford and his mother at Aix-les-Bains. At this distance, and in the
dead of night, my sacrifice in coming here seemed fruitless. Why did I
not allow myself to drift for ever on that pleasant sea which has been
lapping me in sweet and indolent content these many weeks? Of what use
to labour, to struggle, to deny myself, for an art to which I can never
be more than the humblest handmaiden? I felt like crying out, as did
once a braver woman's soul than mine, 'Let me be weak! I have been
seeming to be strong so many years!' The woman and the artist in me have
always struggled for the mastery. So far the artist has triumphed, and
now all at once the woman is uppermost. I should think the two ought
to be able to live peaceably in the same tenement; they do manage it in
some cases; but it seems a law of my being that I shall either be all
one or all the other.
The question for me to ask myself now is, “Am I in love with loving and
with being loved, or am I in love with Willie Beresford?” How many women
have confounded the two, I wonder?
In this mood I fell asleep, and on a sudden I found myself in a dear New
England garden. The pillow slipped away, and my cheek pressed a fragrant
mound of mignonette, the self-same one on which I hid my tear-stained
face and sobbed my heart out in childish grief and longing for the
mother who would never hold me again. The moon came up over the
Belvern Hills and shone on my half-closed lids; but to me it was a very
different moon, the far-away moon of my childhood, with a river rippling
beneath its silver rays. And the wind that rustled among the poplar
branches outside my window was, in my dream, stirring the pink petals of
a blossoming apple-tree that used to grow beside the bank of mignonette,
wafting down sweet odours and drinking in sweeter ones. And presently
there stole in upon this harmony of enchanting sounds and delicate
fragrances, in which childhood and womanhood, pleasure and pain, memory
and anticipation, seemed strangely intermingled, the faint music of a
voice, growing clearer and clearer as my ear became familiar with its
cadences. And what the dream voice said to me was something like this:--
'If thou wouldst have happiness, choose neither fame, which doth not
long abide, nor power, which stings the hand that wields it, nor gold,
which glitters but never glorifies; but choose thou Love, and hold
it for ever in thy heart of hearts; for Love is the purest and the
mightiest force in the universe, and once it is thine all other gifts
shall be added unto thee. Love that is passionate yet reverent, tender
yet strong, selfish in desiring all yet generous in giving all; love
of man for woman and woman for man, of parent for child and friend for
friend--when this is born in the soul, the desert blossoms as the rose.
Straightway new hopes and wishes, sweet longings and pure ambitions,
spring into being, like green shoots that lift their tender heads in
sunny places; and if the soil be kind, they grow stronger and more
beautiful as each glad day laughs in the rosy skies. And by and by
singing-birds come and build their nests in the branches; and these
are the pleasures of life. And the birds sing not often, because of
a serpent that lurketh in the garden. And the name of the serpent is
Satiety. He maketh the heart to grow weary of what it once danced and
leaped to think upon, and the ear to wax dull to the melody of sounds
that once were sweet, and the eye blind to the beauty that once led
enchantment captive. And sometimes--we know not why, but we shall know
hereafter, for life is not completely happy since it is not heaven, nor
completely unhappy since it is the road thither--sometimes the light of
the sun is withdrawn for a moment, and that which is fairest vanishes
from the place that was enriched by its presence. Yet the garden is
never quite deserted. Modest flowers, whose charms we had not noted
when youth was bright and the world seemed ours, now lift their heads
in sheltered places and whisper peace. The morning song of the birds
is hushed, for the dawn breaks less rosily in the eastern skies, but at
twilight they still come and nestle in the branches that were sunned in
the smile of love and watered with its happy tears. And over the grave
of each buried hope or joy stands an angel with strong comforting hands
and patient smile; and the name of the garden is Life, and the angel is
Memory.'