Part 11

It seems a pity to forget these things. They make up, after all, the real preciousness of life. But I'm afraid my writing them down won't make you _feel_ any joy in them again, you old thing. You'll be too brittle and rheumaticky to be able to think of lying on the grass for a whole day except with horror. I'm beginning to dislike the idea of being forced into your old body; and, on reflection, your philosophical detachment, your incapacity to do anything but laugh at the hopes and griefs and exultations and disappointments and bitter pains of your past, seems to me very like the fixed grimace of fleshless death.

_September 23rd._

Mrs. Barnes can't, however hard she tries, be with us absolutely continuously. Gaps in her attendance do inevitably occur. There was one of them to-day; and I seized it to say to Dolly across the momentarily empty middle chair--we were on the terrace and the reading was going on,--'I've not seen you alone since the grape day. I wanted to tell you that I'm not cured. I had a relapse that very night. I meant all I said to you, but I meant too, all I said to myself while I was having the relapse. You'd better know the worst. I simply intolerably hankered.'

Dolly let Merivale fall on her lap, and gazed pensively at the distant mountains across the end of the valley.

'It's only the last growlings,' she said after a moment.

'Growlings?' I echoed.

'It's only the last growlings and mutterings of a thunderstorm that's going away. Whatever it was that happened to you--you've never told me, you know, but I'm quite good at somehow knowing--was very like a thunderstorm. A violent one. It was rather brief, it raged incredibly, and then it rumbled off. Though you were flattened out while it was going on, like some otherwise promising crop--'

'Oh,' I protested; but I had to laugh.

'--still when it took itself off you missed it. I wouldn't talk like this,' she said, turning her sweet eyes to me, 'I wouldn't make fun if I weren't sure you are on the road, anyhow, to being cured. Presently you'll reach the stage when you begin to realise that falling out of love is every bit as agreeable as falling in. It is, you know. It's a wonderful feeling, that gradual restoration to freedom and one's friends.'

'You don't understand after all,' I said.

Dolly said she did.

'No. Because you talk of falling out of love. What has happened to me is far worse than that. That? That's nothing. It's what everybody is doing all the time. What has happened to me is that I've lost my faith. It has been like losing God, after years of trust in Him. I believed with all my heart. And I am desolate.'

But Dolly only shook her head. 'You're not as desolate as you were,' she said. 'Nobody who loves all this as you do--' and she turned up her face to the warm sun, blinking her eyes,--'can go on being desolate long. Besides--really, you know--look at that.'

And she pointed to the shining mountains across the valley's eastern end.

Yes. That is eternal. Beauty is eternal. When I look at that, when I am in the clear mood that, looking at the mountains, really _sees_ them, all the rest, the bewilderment and crying out, the clinging and the hankering, seem indeed unworthy. Imagine, with the vast landscape of the splendid world spread out before you, not moving freely in it on and on rejoicing and praising God, but sitting quite still lamenting in one spot, stuck in sediment.

'Did you say sentiment?' asked Dolly.

'Did I say anything?' I asked in surprise, turning my head to her. 'I thought I was thinking.'

'You were doing it aloud, then,' said Dolly. 'Was the word sentiment?'

'No. Sediment.'

'They're the same thing. I hate them both.'

_September 24th._

What will happen to Mrs. Barnes and Dolly when I go back to England? The weather was a little fidgety to-day and yesterday, a little troubled, like a creature that stirs fretfully in its sleep, and it set me thinking. For once the change really begins at this time of the year it doesn't stop any more. It goes on through an increasing unpleasantness winds, rain, snow, blizzards--till, after Christmas, the real winter begins, without a cloud, without a stir of the air, its short days flooded with sunshine, its dawns and twilights miracles of colour.

All that fuss and noise of snow-flurries and howling winds is only the preparation for the great final calm. The last blizzard, tearing away over the mountains, is like an ugly curtain rolling up; and behold a new world. One night while you are asleep the howls and rattlings suddenly leave off, and in the morning you look out of the window and for the first time for weeks you see the mountains at the end of the valley clear against the eastern sky, clothed in all new snow from head to foot, and behind them the lovely green where the sunrise is getting ready. I know, because I was obliged to be here through the October and November and December of the year the house was built and was being furnished. They were three most horrid months; and the end of them was heaven.

But what will become of Mrs. Barnes and Dolly when the weather does finally break up?

I can't face the picture of them spending a gloomy, half-warmed winter down in some cheap pension; an endless winter of doing without things, of watching every franc. They've been living like that for five years now. Where does Dolly get her sweet serenity from? I wish I could take them to England with me. But Dolly can't go to England. She is German. She is doomed. And Mrs. Barnes is doomed too, inextricably tied up in Dolly's fate. Of course I am going to beg them to stay on here, but it seems a poor thing to offer them, to live up here in blizzards that I run away from myself. It does seem a very doubtful offer of hospitality. I ought, to make it real, to stay on with them. And I simply couldn't. I do believe I would die if I had three months shut up with Mrs. Barnes in blizzards. Let her have everything--the house, the Antoines, all, all that I possess; but only let me go.

My spirit faints at the task before me, at the thought of the persuasions and the protests that will have to be gone through. And Dolly; how can I leave Dolly? I shall be haunted in London by visions of these two up here, the wind raging round the house, the snow piled up to the bedroom windows, sometimes cut off for a whole week from the village, because only in a pause in the blizzard can the little black figures that are peasants come sprawling over the snow with their shovels to dig one out. I know because I have been through it that first winter. But it was all new to us then, and we were a care-free, cheerful group inside the house, five people who loved each other and talked about anything they wanted to, besides being backed reassuringly by a sack of lentils and several sacks of potatoes that Antoine, even then prudent and my right hand, had laid in for just this eventuality. We made great fires, and brewed strange drinks. We sat round till far into the nights telling ghost stories. We laughed a good deal, and said just what we felt like saying. But Mrs. Barnes and Dolly? Alone up here, and undug out? It will haunt me.

_September 25th._

She hasn't noticed the weather yet. At least, she has drawn no deductions from it. Evidently she thinks its fitfulness, its gleams of sunshine and its uneasy cloudings over, are just a passing thing and that it soon will settle down again to what it was before. After all, she no doubt says to herself, it is still September. But Antoine knows better, and so do I, and it is merely hours now before the break-up will be plain even to Mrs. Barnes. Then the _combats de générosité_ will begin. I can't, I can't stop here so that Mrs. Barnes may be justified to herself in stopping too on the ground of cheering my solitude. I drank the castor oil solely that her mind might be at rest, but I can't develope any further along lines of such awful magnanimity. I would die.

_September 26th._

To-day I smoked twelve cigarettes, only that the house should smell virile. They're not as good as a pipe for that, but they're better than the eternal characterless clean smell of unselfish women.

After each cigarette Mrs. Barnes got up unobtrusively and aired the room. Then I lit another.

Also I threw the cushions on the floor before flinging myself on the sofa in the hall; and presently Mrs. Barnes came and tidied them.

Then I threw them down again.

Towards evening she asked me if I was feeling quite well. I wasn't, because of the cigarettes, but I didn't tell her that. I said I felt very well indeed. Naturally I couldn't explain to her that I had only been trying to pretend there was a man about.

'You're sure those grape-stones--?' she began anxiously.

'Oh, certain!' I cried; and hastily became meek.

_September 27th._

Oaths, now. I shrink from so much as suggesting it, but there _is_ something to be said for them. They're so brief. They get the mood over. They clear the air. Women explain and protest and tiptoe tactfully about among what they think are your feelings, and there's no end to it. And then, if they're good women, good, affectionate, unselfish women, they have a way of forgiving you. They keep on forgiving you. Freely. With a horrible magnanimousness. Mrs. Barnes insisted on forgiving me yesterday for the cigarettes, for the untidiness. It isn't a happy thing, I think, to be shut up in a small lonely house being forgiven.

_September 28th._

In the night the wind shook the windows and the rain pelted against them, and I knew that when I went down to breakfast the struggle with Mrs. Barnes would begin.

It did. It began directly after breakfast in the hall, where Antoine, remarking firmly '_C'est l'hiver_,' had lit a roaring fire, determined this time to stand no parsimonious nonsense, and it has gone on all day, with the necessary intervals for recuperation.

Nothing has been settled. I still don't in the least know what to do. Mrs. Barnes's attitude is obstinately unselfish. She and Dolly, she reiterates, won't dream of staying on here unless they feel that by doing so they could be of service to me by keeping me company. If I'm not here I can't be kept company with; that, she says, I must admit.

I do. Every time she says it--it has been a day of reiterations--I admit it. Therefore, if I go they go, she finishes with a kind of sombre triumph at her determination not to give trouble or be an expense; but words fail her, she adds, (this is a delusion,) to express her gratitude for my offer, etc., and never, for the rest of their lives, will she and Dolly forget the delightful etc., etc.

What am I to do? I don't know. How lightly one embarks on marriage and on guests, and in what unexpected directions do both develope! Also, what a terrible thing is unselfishness. Once it has become a habit, how tough, how difficult to uproot. A single obstinately unselfish person can wreck the happiness of a whole household. Is it possible that I shall have to stay here? And I have so many things waiting for me in England that have to be done.

There's a fire in my bedroom, and I've been sitting on the floor staring into it for the past hour, seeking a solution. Because all the while Mrs. Barnes is firmly refusing to listen for a moment to my entreaties to use the house while I'm away, her thin face is hungry with longing to accept, and the mere talking, however bravely, of taking up the old homeless wandering again fills her tired eyes with tears.

Once I got so desperate that I begged her to stay as a kindness to me, in order to keep an eye on those patently efficient and trustworthy Antoines. This indeed was the straw-clutching of the drowning, and even Mrs. Barnes, that rare smiler, smiled.

No. I don't know what to do. How the wind screams. I'll go to bed.

_September 29th._

And there's nothing to be done with Dolly either.

'You told me you put your foot down sometimes,' I said, appealing to her this morning in one of Mrs. Barnes's brief absences, 'Why don't you put it down now?'

'Because I don't want to,' said Dolly.

'But _why_ not?' I asked, exasperated. 'It's so reasonable what I suggest, so easy--'

'I don't want to stay here without you,' said Dolly. 'This place _is_ you. You've made it. It is soaked in you. I should feel haunted here without you. Why, I should feel lost.'

'As though you would! When we hardly speak to each other as it is--'

'But I watch you,' said Dolly, smiling, 'and I know what you're thinking. You've no idea how what you're thinking comes out on your face.'

'But if it makes your unhappy sister's mind more comfortable? If she feels free from anxiety here? If she feels you are safe here?' I passionately reasoned.

'I don't want to be safe.'

'Oh Dolly--you're not going to break out again?' I asked, as anxiously every bit as poor Mrs. Barnes would have asked.

Dolly laughed. 'I'll never do anything again that makes Kitty unhappy,' she said. 'But I do like the feeling--' she made a movement with her arms as though they were wings--'oh, I _like_ the feeling of having room!'

_September 30th._

The weather is better again, and there has been a pause in our strivings. Mrs. Barnes and I have drifted, tired both of us, I resting in that refuge of the weak, the putting off of making up my mind, back into talking only of the situation and the view. If Mrs. Barnes were either less good or more intelligent! But the combination of non-intelligence with goodness is unassailable. You can't get through. Nothing gets through. You give in. You are flattened out. You become a slave. And your case is indeed hopeless if the non-intelligent and good, are at the same time the victims, nobly enduring, of undeserved misfortune.

_Evening._

A really remarkable thing happened to-day: I've had a prayer answered. I shall never dare pray again. I prayed for a man, any man, to come and leaven us, and I've got him.

Let me set it down in order.

This afternoon on our walk, soon after we had left the house and were struggling along against gusts of wind and whirling leaves in the direction, as it happened, of the carriage road up from the valley, Dolly said, 'Who is that funny little man coming towards us?'

And I looked, and said after a moment in which my heart stood still--for what had _he_ come for?--'That funny little man is my uncle.'

There he was, the authentic uncle: gaiters, apron, shovel hat. He was holding on his hat, and the rude wind, thwarted in its desire to frolic with it, frisked instead about his apron, twitching it up, bellying it out; so that his remaining hand had all it could do to smooth the apron down again decorously, and he was obliged to carry his umbrella pressed tightly against his side under his arm.

'Not your uncle the Dean?' asked Mrs. Barnes in a voice of awe, hastily arranging her toque; for a whiff of the Church, any whiff, even one so faint as a curate, is as the breath of life to her.

'Yes,' I said, amazed and helpless. 'My Uncle Rudolph.'

'Why, he might be a German,' said Dolly, 'with a name like that.'

'Oh, but don't say so to him!' I cried. 'He has a perfect _horror_ of Germans--'

And it was out before I remembered, before I could stop it. Good heavens, I thought; good heavens.

I looked sideways at Mrs. Barnes. She was, I am afraid, very red. So I plunged in again, eager to reassure her. 'That is to say,' I said, 'he used to have during the war. But of course now that the war is over it would be mere silliness--nobody minds now--nobody _ought_ to mind now--'

My voice, however, trailed out into silence, for I knew, and Mrs. Barnes knew, that people do mind.

By this time we were within hail of my uncle, and with that joy one instinctively assumes on such occasions I waved my stick in exultant circles at him and called out, 'How very delightful of you, Uncle Rudolph!' And I advanced to greet him, the others tactfully dropping behind, alone.

There on the mountain side, with the rude wind whisking his clothes irreverently about, we kissed; and in my uncle's kiss I instantly perceived something of the quality of Mrs. Barnes's speeches the day I smoked the twelve cigarettes,--he was forgiving me.

'I have come to escort you home to England,' he said, his face spread over with the spirit of allowing byegones to be byegones; and in that spirit he let go of his apron in order reassuringly to pat my shoulder.

Immediately the apron bellied. His hand had abruptly to leave my shoulder so as to clutch it down again. 'You are with ladies?' he said a little distractedly, holding on to this turbulent portion of his clothing.

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph,' I replied modestly. 'I hope you didn't expect to find me with gentlemen?'

'I expected to find you, dear child, as I have always found you,--ready to admit and retrace. Generously ready to admit and retrace.'

'Sweet of you,' I murmured. 'But you should have let me know you were coming. I'd have had things killed for you. Fatted things.'

'It is not I,' he said, in as gentle a voice as he could manage, the wind being what it was, 'who am the returning prodigal. Indeed I wish for your sake that I were. My shoulders could bear the burden better than those little ones of yours.'

This talk was ominous, so I said, 'I must introduce you to Mrs. Barnes and her sister Mrs. Jewks. Let me present,' I said ceremoniously, turning to them who were now fortunately near enough, 'my Uncle Rudolph to you, of whom you have often heard me speak.'

'Indeed we have,' said Mrs. Barnes, with as extreme a cordiality as awe permitted.

My uncle, obviously relieved to find his niece not eccentrically alone but flanked by figures so respectable, securely, as it were, embedded in widows, was very gracious. Mrs. Barnes received his pleasant speeches with delighted reverence; and as we went back to the house, for the first thing to do with arrivals from England is to give them a bath, he and she fell naturally into each other's company along the narrow track, and Dolly and I followed behind.

We looked at each other, simultaneously perceiving the advantages of four rather than of three. Behind Mrs. Barnes's absorbed and obsequious back we looked at each other with visions in our eyes of unsupervised talks opening before us.

'They have their uses, you see,' I said in a low voice,--not that I need have lowered it in that wind.

'Deans have,' agreed Dolly, nodding.

And my desire to laugh,--discreetly, under my breath, ready to pull my face sober and be gazing at the clouds the minute our relations should turn round, was strangled by the chill conviction that my uncle's coming means painful things for me.

He is going to talk to me; talk about what I am trying so hard not to think of, what I really am succeeding in not thinking of; and he is going to approach the desolating subject in, as he will say and perhaps even persuade himself to believe, a Christian spirit, but in what really is a spirit of sheer worldliness. He has well-founded hopes of soon going to be a bishop. I am his niece. The womenkind of bishops should be inconspicuous, should see to it that comment cannot touch them. Therefore he is going to try to get me to deliver myself up to a life of impossible wretchedness again, only that the outside of it may look in order. The outside of the house,--of the house of a bishop's niece,--at all costs keep it neat, keep it looking like all the others in the street; so shall nobody know what is going on inside, and the neighbours won't talk about one's uncle.

If I were no relation but just a mere ordinary stranger-soul in difficulties, he, this very same man, would be full of understanding, would find himself unable, indeed, the facts being what they are, to be anything but most earnestly concerned to help me keep clear of all temptations to do what he calls retrace. And at the same time he would be concerned also to strengthen me in that mood which is I am sure the right one, and does very often recur, of being entirely without resentment and so glad to have the remembrance at least of the beautiful things I believed in. But I am his niece. He is about to become a bishop. Naturally he has to be careful not to be too much like Christ.

Accordingly I followed uneasily in his footsteps towards the house, dreading what was going to happen next. And nothing has happened next. Not yet, anyhow. I expect to-morrow....

We spent a most bland evening. I'm as sleepy and as much satiated by ecclesiastical good things as though I had been the whole day in church. My uncle, washed, shaven, and restored by tea, laid himself out to entertain. He was the decorous life of the party. He let himself go to that tempered exuberance with which good men of his calling like to prove that they really are not so very much different from other people after all. Round the hall fire we sat after tea, and again after supper, Dolly and I facing each other at the corners, my uncle and Mrs. Barnes in the middle, and the room gently echoed with seemly and strictly wholesome mirth. 'How enjoyable,' my uncle seemed to say, looking at us at the end of each of his good stories, gathering in the harvest of our appreciation, 'how enjoyable is the indulgence of legitimate fun. Why need one ever indulge in illegitimacy?'

And indeed his stories were so very good that every one of them, before they reached the point of bringing forth their joke, must have been to church and got married.

Dolly sat knitting, the light shining on her infantile fair hair, her eyes downcast in a dove-like meekness. Punctually her dimple flickered out at the right moment in each anecdote. She appeared to know by instinct where to smile; and several times I was only aware that the moment had come by happening to notice her dimple.

As for Mrs. Barnes, for the first time since I have known her, her face was cloudless. My uncle, embarked on anecdote, did not mention the war. We did not once get on to Germans. Mrs. Barnes could give herself up to real enjoyment. She beamed. She was suffused with reverential delight. And her whole body, the very way she sat in her chair, showed an absorption, an eagerness not to miss a crumb of my uncle's talk, that would have been very gratifying to him if he were not used to just this. It is strange how widows cling to clergymen. Ever since I can remember, like the afflicted Margaret's apprehensions in Wordsworth's poem, they have come to Uncle Rudolph in crowds. My aunt used to raise her eyebrows and ask me if I could at all tell her what they saw in him.

When we bade each other goodnight there was something in Mrs. Barnes's manner to me that showed me the presence of a man was already doing its work. She was aerated. Fresh, air had got into her and was circulating freely. At my bedroom door she embraced me with warm and simple heartiness, without the usual painful search of my face to see if by any chance there was anything she had left undone in her duty of being unselfish. My uncle's arrival has got her thoughts off me for a bit. I knew that what we wanted was a man. Not that a dean is quite my idea of a man, but then on the other hand neither is he quite my idea of a woman, and his arrival does put an end for the moment to Mrs. Barnes's and my dreadful _combats de générosité_. He infuses fresh blood into our anaemic little circle. Different blood, perhaps I should rather say; the blood of deans not being, I think, ever very fresh.

'Good night, Uncle Rudolph,' I said, getting up at ten o'clock and holding up my face to him. 'We have to thank you for a delightful evening.'

'Most delightful,' echoed Mrs. Barnes enthusiastically, getting up too and rolling up her knitting.

My uncle was gratified. He felt he had been at his best, and that his best had been appreciated.

'Good night, dear child,' he said, kissing my offered cheek. 'May the blessed angels watch about your bed.'

'Thank you, Uncle Rudolph,' I said, bowing my head beneath this benediction.