Part 10

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.

I knew what I must be looking like by looking at her.

It was five o'clock by the time we reached the field with the crocuses, and we sank down on the grass where we had sat in the morning, speechless, dripping, overwhelmed by grapes. For a long while we said nothing. It was bliss to lie in the cool grass and not to have to carry anything. The sun, low in the sky, slanted almost level along the field, and shining right through the thin-petalled crocuses made of each a little star. I don't know anything more happy than to be where it is beautiful with some one who sees and loves it as much as you do yourself. We lay stretched out on the grass, quite silent, watching the splendour grow and grow till, having reached a supreme moment of radiance, it suddenly went out. The sun dropped behind the mountains along to the west, and out went the light; with a flick; in an instant. And the crocuses, left standing in their drab field, looked like so many blown-out candles.

Dolly sat up.

'There now,' she said. 'That's over. They look as blind and dim as a woman whose lover has left her. Have you ever,' she asked, turning her head to me still lying pillowed on Mrs. Barnes's grapes--the basket had a lid--'seen a woman whose lover has left her?'

'Of course I have. Everybody has been left by somebody.'

'I mean _just_ left.'

'Yes. I've seen that too.'

'They look exactly like that,' said Dolly, nodding towards the crocuses. 'Smitten colourless. Light gone, life gone, beauty gone,--dead things in a dead world. I don't,' she concluded, shaking her head slowly, 'hold with love.'

At this I sat up too, and began to tidy my hair and put my hat on again. 'It's cold,' I said, 'now that the sun is gone. Let us go home.'

Dolly didn't move.

'Do you?' she asked.

'Do I what?'

'Hold with love.'

'Yes,' I said.

'Whatever happens?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Whatever its end is?'

'Yes,' I said. 'And I won't even say yes _and_ no, as the cautious Charlotte Brontë did when she was asked if she liked London. I won't be cautious in love. I won't look at all the reasons for saying no. It's a glorious thing to have had. It's splendid to have believed all one did believe.'

'Even when there never was a shred of justification for the belief?' asked Dolly, watching me.

'Yes,' I said; and began passionately to pin my hat on, digging the pins into my head in my vehemence. 'Yes. The thing is to believe. Not go round first cautiously on tiptoe so as to be sure before believing and trusting that your precious belief and trust are going to be safe. Safe! There's no safety in love. You risk the whole of life. But the great thing _is_ to risk--to believe, and to risk everything for your belief. And if there wasn't anything there, if it was you all by yourself who imagined the beautiful kind things in the other one, the wonderful, generous, beautiful kind things, what does it matter? They weren't there, but _you_ for once were capable of imagining them. You _were_ up among the stars for a little, you _did_ touch heaven. And when you've had the tumble down again and you're scrunched all to pieces and are just a miserable heap of blood and brokenness, where's your grit that you should complain? Haven't you seen wonders up there past all telling, and had supreme joys? It's because you were up in heaven that your fall is so tremendous and hurts so. What you've got to do is not to be killed. You've got at all costs to stay alive, so that for the rest of your days you may go gratefully, giving thanks to God that once ... you see,' I finished suddenly, 'I'm a great believer in saying thank you.'

'Oh,' said Dolly, laying her hand on my knee and looking at me very kindly, 'I'm so glad!'

'Now what are you glad about, Dolly?' I asked, turning on her and giving my hat a pull straight. And I added, my chin in the air, 'Those dead women of yours in their dead world, indeed! Ashamed of themselves--that's what they ought to be.'

'You're cured,' said Dolly.

'Cured,' I echoed.

I stared at her severely. 'Oh--I see,' I said. 'You've been drawing me out.'

'Of course I have. I couldn't bear to think of you going on being unhappy--hankering--'

'Hankering?'

Dolly got up. 'Now let's go home,' she said. 'It's my turn to carry the basket. Yes, it's a horrid word. Nobody should ever hanker. I couldn't bear it if you did. I've been afraid that perhaps--'

'Hankering!'

I got up too and stood very straight.

'Give me those grapes,' said Dolly.

'Hankering!' I said again.

And the rest of the way home, along the cool path where the dusk was gathering among the bushes and the grass was damp now beneath our dusty shoes, we walked with heads held high--hankering indeed!--two women surely in perfect harmony with life and the calm evening, women of wisdom and intelligence, of a proper pride and self-respect, kind women, good women, pleasant, amiable women, contented women, pleased women; and at the last corner, the last one between us and Mrs. Barnes's eye on the terrace, Dolly stopped, put down the basket, and laying both her arms about my shoulders kissed me.

'Cured,' she said, kissing me on one side of my face. 'Safe,' she said, kissing me on the other.

And we laughed, both of us, confident and glad. And I went up to my room confident and glad, for if I felt cured and Dolly was sure I was cured, mustn't it be true?

Hankering indeed.

_September 21st._

But I'm not cured. For when I was alone in my room last night and the house was quiet with sleep, a great emptiness came upon me, and those fine defiant words of mine in the afternoon seemed poor things, poor dwindled things, like kaisers in their night-gowns. For hours I lay awake with only one longing: to creep back,--back into my shattered beliefs, even if it were the littlest corner of them. Surely there must be some corner of them still, with squeezing, habitable? I'm so small. I need hardly any room. I'd curl up. I'd fit myself in. And I wouldn't look at the ruin of the great splendid spaces I once thought I lived in, but be content with a few inches. Oh, it's cold, cold, cold, left outside of faith like this....

For hours I lay awake; and being ashamed of myself did no good, because love doesn't mind about being ashamed.

_Evening._

All day I've slunk about in silence, watching for a moment alone with Dolly. I want to tell her that it was only one side of me yesterday, and that there's another, and another--oh, so many others; that I meant every word I said, but there are other things, quite different, almost opposite things that I also mean; that it's true I'm cured, but only cured in places, and over the rest of me, the rest that is still sick, great salt waves of memories wash every now and then and bite and bite....

But Dolly, who seems more like an unruffled pool of clear water to-day than ever, hasn't left Mrs. Barnes's side; making up, I suppose, for being away from her all yesterday.

Towards tea-time I became aware that Mrs. Barnes was watching me with a worried face, the well-known worried, anxious face, and I guessed she was wondering if Dolly had been indiscreet on our picnic and told me things that had shocked me into silence. So I cast about in my mind for something to reassure her, and, as I thought fortunately, very soon remembered the grapes.

'I'm afraid I ate too many grapes yesterday,' I said, when next I caught her worried, questioning eye.

Her face cleared. I congratulated myself. But I didn't congratulate myself long; for Mrs. Barnes, all motherly solicitude, inquired if by any chance I had swallowed some of the stones; and desiring to reassure her to the utmost as to the reason of my thoughtfulness, I said that very likely I had; from the feel of things; from the kind of heaviness.... And she, before I could stop her, had darted into the kitchen--these lean women are terribly nimble--and before I could turn round or decide what to do next, for by this time I was suspicious, she was back again with Mrs. Antoine and all the dreadful paraphernalia of castor oil. And I had to drink it. And it seemed hard that because I had been so benevolently desirous to reassure Mrs. Barnes I should have to drink castor oil and be grateful to her as well.

'This is petty,' I thought, sombrely eyeing the bottle,--I alluded in my mind to Fate.

But as I had to drink the stuff I might as well do it gallantly. And so I did; tossing it off with an air, after raising the glass and wishing the onlookers health and happiness in what I tried to make a pleasant speech.

Mrs. Barnes, Mrs. Antoine and Dolly stood watching me spellbound. A shudder rippled over them as the last drops slid down.

Then I came up here.

_September 22nd._

Let me draw your attention, O ancient woman sitting at the end of my life, to the colour of the trees and bushes in this place you once lived in, in autumns that for you are now so far away. Do you remember how it was like flames, and the very air was golden? The hazel-bushes, do you remember them? Along the path that led down from the terrace to the village? How each separate one was like a heap of light? Do you remember how you spent to-day, the 22nd of September, 1919, lying on a rug in the sun close up under one of them, content to stare at the clear yellow leaves against the amazing sky? You ve forgotten, I daresay. You re only thinking of your next meal and being put to bed. But you did spend a day to-day worth remembering. You were very content. You were exactly balanced in the present, without a single oscillation towards either the past, a period you hadn't then learned to regard with the levity for which you are now so remarkable, or to the future, which you at that time, however much the attitude may amuse you now, thought of with doubt and often with fear. Mrs. Barnes let you go to-day, having an appreciation of the privileges due to the dosed, and you took a cushion and a rug--active, weren't you--and there you lay the whole blessed day, the sun warm on your body, enfolded in freshness, thinking of nothing but calm things. Rather like a baby you were; a baby on its back sucking its thumb and placidly contemplating the nursery ceiling. But the ceiling was the great sky, with, two eagles ever so far up curving in its depths, and when they sloped their wings the sun caught them and they flashed.