The Enchanted April
The Enchanted AprilChapter 1Chapter 2Chapter 3Chapter 4Chapter 5Chapter 6Chapter 7Chapter 8Chapter 9Chapter 10Chapter 11Chapter 12Chapter 13Chapter 14Chapter 15Chapter 16Chapter 17Chapter 18Chapter 19Chapter 20Chapter 21Chapter 22Copyright
The Enchanted April
Elizabeth Von Arnim
Chapter 1
It began in a Woman’s Club in London on a February
afternoon—an uncomfortable club, and a miserable afternoon—when
Mrs. Wilkins, who had come down from Hampstead to shop and had
lunched at her club, took upThe Timesfrom the table in the smoking-room, and running her listless
eye down the Agony Column saw this:To Those Who Appreciate Wistaria and Sunshine. Small
mediaeval Italian Castle on the shores of the Mediterranean to be
Let furnished for the month of April. Necessary servants remain. Z,
Box 1000,The Times.That was its conception; yet, as in the case of many another,
the conceiver was unaware of it at the moment.So entirely unaware was Mrs. Wilkins that her April for that
year had then and there been settled for her that she dropped the
newspaper with a gesture that was both irritated and resigned, and
went over to the window and stared drearily out at the dripping
street.Not for her were mediaeval castles, even those that are
specially described as small. Not for her the shores in April of
the Mediterranean, and the wisteria and sunshine. Such delights
were only for the rich. Yet the advertisement had been addressed to
persons who appreciate these things, so that it had been, anyhow
addressed too to her, for she certainly appreciated them; more than
anybody knew; more than she had ever told. But she was poor. In the
whole world she possessed of her very own only ninety pounds, saved
from year to year, put by carefully pound by pound, out of her
dress allowance. She had scraped this sum together at the
suggestion of her husband as a shield and refuge against a rainy
day. Her dress allowance, given her by her father, was £100 a year,
so that Mrs. Wilkins’s clothes were what her husband, urging her to
save, called modest and becoming, and her acquaintance to each
other, when they spoke of her at all, which was seldom for she was
very negligible, called a perfect sight.Mr. Wilkins, a solicitor, encouraged thrift, except that
branch of it which got into his food. He did not call that thrift,
he called it bad housekeeping. But for the thrift which, like moth,
penetrated into Mrs. Wilkins’s clothes and spoilt them, he had much
praise. “You never know,” he said, “when there will be a rainy day,
and you may be very glad to find you have a nest-egg. Indeed we
both may.”Looking out of the club window into Shaftesbury Avenue—hers
was an economical club, but convenient for Hampstead, where she
lived, and for Shoolbred’s, where she shopped—Mrs. Wilkins, having
stood there some time very drearily, her mind’s eye on the
Mediterranean in April, and the wisteria, and the enviable
opportunities of the rich, while her bodily eye watched the really
extremely horrible sooty rain falling steadily on the hurrying
umbrellas and splashing omnibuses, suddenly wondered whether
perhaps this was not the rainy day Mellersh—Mellersh was Mr.
Wilkins—had so often encouraged her to prepare for, and whether to
get out of such a climate and into the small mediaeval castle
wasn’t perhaps what Providence had all along intended her to do
with her savings. Part of her savings, of course; perhaps quite a
small part. The castle, being mediaeval, might also be dilapidated,
and dilapidations were surely cheap. She wouldn’t in the least mind
a few of them, because you didn’t pay for dilapidations which were
already there, on the contrary—by reducing the price you had to pay
they really paid you. But what nonsense to think of it . .
.She turned away from the window with the same gesture of
mingled irritation and resignation with which she had laid
downThe Times, and crossed the
room towards the door with the intention of getting her mackintosh
and umbrella and fighting her way into one of the overcrowded
omnibuses and going to Shoolbred’s on her way home and buying some
soles for Mellersh’s dinner—Mellersh was difficult with fish and
liked only soles, except salmon—when she beheld Mrs. Arbuthnot, a
woman she knew by sight as also living in Hampstead and belonging
to the club, sitting at the table in the middle of the room on
which the newspapers and magazines were kept, absorbed, in her
turn, in the first page ofThe Times.Mrs. Wilkins had never yet spoken to Mrs. Arbuthnot, who
belonged to one of the various church sets, and who analysed,
classified, divided and registered the poor; whereas she and
Mellersh, when they did go out, went to the parties of
impressionist painters, of whom in Hampstead there were many.
Mellersh had a sister who had married one of them and lived up on
the Heath, and because of this alliance Mrs. Wilkins was drawn into
a circle which was highly unnatural to her, and she had learned to
dread pictures. She had to say things about them, and she didn’t
know what to say. She used to murmur, “marvelous,” and feel that it
was not enough. But nobody minded. Nobody listened. Nobody took any
notice of Mrs. Wilkins. She was the kind of person who is not
noticed at parties. Her clothes, infested by thrift, made her
practically invisible; her face was non-arresting; her conversation
was reluctant; she was shy. And if one’s clothes and face and
conversation are all negligible, thought Mrs. Wilkins, who
recognized her disabilities, what, at parties, is there left of
one?Also she was always with Wilkins, that clean-shaven,
fine-looking man, who gave a party, merely by coming to it, a great
air. Wilkins was very respectable. He was known to be highly
thought of by his senior partners. His sister’s circle admired him.
He pronounced adequately intelligent judgments on art and artists.
He was pithy; he was prudent; he never said a word too much, nor,
on the other had, did he ever say a word too little. He produced
the impression of keeping copies of everything he said; and he was
so obviously reliable that it often happened that people who met
him at these parties became discontented with their own solicitors,
and after a period of restlessness extricated themselves and went
to Wilkins.Naturally Mrs. Wilkins was blotted out. “She,” said his
sister, with something herself of the judicial, the digested, and
the final in her manner, “should stay at home.” But Wilkins could
not leave his wife at home. He was a family solicitor, and all such
have wives and show them. With his in the week he went to parties,
and with his on Sundays he went to church. Being still fairly
young—he was thirty-nine—and ambitious of old ladies, of whom he
had not yet acquired in his practice a sufficient number, he could
not afford to miss church, and it was there that Mrs. Wilkins
became familiar, though never through words, with Mrs.
Arbuthnot.She saw her marshalling the children of the poor into pews.
She would come in at the head of the procession from the Sunday
School exactly five minutes before the choir, and get her boys and
girls neatly fitted into their allotted seats, and down on their
little knees in their preliminary prayer, and up again on their
feet just as, to the swelling organ, the vestry door opened, and
the choir and clergy, big with the litanies and commandments they
were presently to roll out, emerged. She had a sad face, yet she
was evidently efficient. The combination used to make Mrs. Wilkins
wonder, for she had been told by Mellersh, on days when she had
only been able to get plaice, that if one were efficient one
wouldn’t be depressed, and that if one does one’s job well one
becomes automatically bright and brisk.About Mrs. Arbuthnot there was nothing bright and brisk,
though much in her way with the Sunday School children that was
automatic; but when Mrs. Wilkins, turning from the window, caught
sight of her in the club she was not being automatic at all, but
was looking fixedly at one portion of the first page ofThe Times, holding the paper quite
still, her eyes not moving. She was just staring; and her face, as
usual, was the face of a patient and disappointed
Madonna.Mrs. Wilkins watched her a minute, trying to screw up courage
to speak to her. She wanted to ask her if she had seen the
advertisement. She did not know why she wanted to ask her this, but
she wanted to. How stupid not to be able to speak to her. She
looked so kind. She looked so unhappy. Why couldn’t two unhappy
people refresh each other on their way through this dusty business
of life by a little talk—real, natural talk, about what they felt,
what they would have liked, what they still tried to hope? And she
could not help thinking that Mrs. Arbuthnot, too, was reading that
very same advertisement. Her eyes were on the very part of the
paper. Was she, too, picturing what it would be like—the colour,
the fragrance, the light, the soft lapping of the sea among little
hot rocks? Colour, fragrance, light, sea; instead of Shaftesbury
Avenue, and the wet omnibuses, and the fish department at
Shoolbred’s, and the Tube to Hampstead, and dinner, and to-morrow
the same and the day after the same and always the same . .
.Suddenly Mrs. Wilkins found herself leaning across the table.
“Are you reading about the mediaeval castle and the wisteria?” she
heard herself asking.Naturally Mrs. Arbuthnot was surprised; but she was not half
so much surprised as Mrs. Wilkins was at herself for
asking.Mrs. Arbuthnot had not yet to her knowledge set eyes on the
shabby, lank, loosely-put-together figure sitting opposite her,
with its small freckled face and big grey eyes almost disappearing
under a smashed-down wet-weather hat, and she gazed at her a moment
without answering. Shewasreading about the mediaeval castle and the wisteria, or
rather had read about it ten minutes before, and since then had
been lost in dreams—of light, of colour, of fragrance, of the soft
lapping of the sea among little hot rocks . . .
“ Why do you ask me that?” she said in her grave voice, for
her training of and by the poor had made her grave and
patient.Mrs. Wilkins flushed and looked excessively shy and
frightened. “Oh, only because I saw it too, and I thought perhaps—I
thought somehow—” she stammered.Whereupon Mrs. Arbuthnot, her mind being used to getting
people into lists and divisions, from habit considered, as she
gazed thoughtfully at Mrs. Wilkins, under what heading, supposing
she had to classify her, she could most properly be
put.
“ And I know you by sight,” went on Mrs. Wilkins, who, like
all the shy, once she was started; lunged on, frightening herself
to more and more speech by the sheer sound of what she had said
last in her ears. “Every Sunday—I see you every Sunday in
church—”
“ In church?” echoed Mrs. Arbuthnot.
“ And this seems such a wonderful thing—this advertisement
about the wisteria—and—”Mrs. Wilkins, who must have been at least thirty, broke off
and wriggled in her chair with the movement of an awkward and
embarrassed schoolgirl.
“ It seemssowonderful,”
she went on in a kind of burst, “and—it is such a miserable day . .
.”And then she sat looking at Mrs. Arbuthnot with the eyes of
an imprisoned dog.
“ This poor thing,” thought Mrs. Arbuthnot, whose life was
spent in helping and alleviating, “needs advice.”She accordingly prepared herself patiently to give
it.
“ If you see me in church,” she said, kindly and attentively,
“I suppose you live in Hampstead too?”
“ Oh yes,” said Mrs. Wilkins. And she repeated, her head on
its long thin neck drooping a little as if the recollection of
Hampstead bowed her, “Oh yes.”
“ Where?” asked Mrs. Arbuthnot, who, when advice was needed,
naturally first proceeded to collect the facts.But Mrs. Wilkins, laying her hand softly and caressingly on
the part ofThe Timeswhere the
advertisement was, as though the mere printed words of it were
precious, only said, “Perhaps that is why this seems so
wonderful.”
“ No—I thinkthat’swonderful anyhow,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, forgetting facts and
faintly sighing.
“ Then youwerereading
it?”
“ Yes,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, her eyes going dreamy
again.
“ Wouldn’t it be wonderful?” murmured Mrs.
Wilkins.
“ Wonderful,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot. Her face, which had lit
up, faded into patience again. “Very wonderful,” she said. “But
it’s no use wasting one’s time thinking of such
things.”
“ Oh, but itis,” was
Mrs. Wilkins’s quick, surprising reply; surprising because it was
so much unlike the rest of her—the characterless coat and skirt,
the crumpled hat, the undecided wisp of hair straggling out, “And
just the considering of them is worth while in itself—such a change
from Hampstead—and sometimes I believe—I really do believe—if one
considers hard enough one gets things.”Mrs. Arbuthnot observed her patiently. In what category would
she, supposing she had to, put her?
“ Perhaps,” she said, leaning forward a little, “you will
tell me your name. If we are to be friends”—she smiled her grave
smile—“as I hope we are, we had better begin at the
beginning.”
“ Oh yes—how kind of you. I’m Mrs. Wilkins,” said Mrs.
Wilkins. “I don’t expect,” she added, flushing, as Mrs. Arbuthnot
said nothing, “that it conveys anything to you. Sometimes it—it
doesn’t seem to convey anything to me either. But”—she looked round
with a movement of seeking help—“IamMrs. Wilkins.”She did not like her name. It was a mean, small name, with a
kind of facetious twist, she thought, about its end like the upward
curve of a pugdog’s tail. There it was, however. There was no doing
anything with it. Wilkins she was and Wilkins she would remain; and
though her husband encouraged her to give it on all occasions as
Mrs. Mellersh-Wilkins she only did that when he was within earshot,
for she thought Mellersh made Wilkins worse, emphasizing it in the
way Chatsworth on the gate-posts of a villa emphasizes the
villa.When first he suggested she should add Mellersh she had
objected for the above reason, and after a pause—Mellersh was much
too prudent to speak except after a pause, during which presumably
he was taking a careful mental copy of his coming observation—he
said, much displeased, “But I am not a villa,” and looked at her as
he looks who hopes, for perhaps the hundredth time, that he may not
have married a fool.Of course he was not a villa, Mrs. Wilkins assured him; she
had never supposed he was; she had not dreamed of meaning . . . she
was only just thinking . . .The more she explained the more earnest became Mellersh’s
hope, familiar to him by this time, for he had then been a husband
for two years, that he might not by any chance have married a fool;
and they had a prolonged quarrel, if that can be called a quarrel
which is conducted with dignified silence on one side and earnest
apology on the other, as to whether or no Mrs. Wilkins had intended
to suggest that Mr. Wilkins was a villa.
“ I believe,” she had thought when it was at last over—it
took a long while—“thatanybodywould quarrel aboutanythingwhen they’ve not left off being together for a single day for
two whole years. What we both need is a holiday.”
“ My husband,” went on Mrs. Wilkins to Mrs. Arbuthnot, trying
to throw some light on herself, “is a solicitor. He—” She cast
about for something she could say elucidatory of Mellersh, and
found: “He’s very handsome.”
“ Well,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot kindly, “that must be a great
pleasure to you.”
“ Why?” asked Mrs. Wilkins.
“ Because,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, a little taken aback, for
constant intercourse with the poor had accustomed her to have her
pronouncements accepted without question, “because
beauty—handsomeness— is a gift like any other, and if it is
properly used—”She trailed off into silence. Mrs. Wilkins’s great grey eyes
were fixed on her, and it seemed suddenly to Mrs. Arbuthnot that
perhaps she was becoming crystallized into a habit of exposition,
and of exposition after the manner of nursemaids, through having an
audience that couldn’t but agree, that would be afraid, if it
wished, to interrupt, that didn’t know, that was, in fact, at her
mercy.But Mrs. Wilkins was not listening; for just then, absurd as
it seemed, a picture had flashed across her brain, and there were
two figures in it sitting together under a great trailing wisteria
that stretched across the branches of a tree she didn’t know, and
it was herself and Mrs. Arbuthnot—she saw them—she saw them. And
behind them, bright in sunshine, were old grey walls—the mediaeval
castle —she saw it—they were there . . .She therefore stared at Mrs. Arbuthnot and did not hear a
word she said. And Mrs. Arbuthnot stared too at Mrs. Wilkins,
arrested by the expression on her face, which was swept by the
excitement of what she saw, and was as luminous and tremulous under
it as water in sunlight when it is ruffled by a gust of wind. At
this moment, if she had been at a party, Mrs. Wilkins would have
been looked at with interest.They stared at each other; Mrs. Arbuthnot surprised,
inquiringly, Mrs. Wilkins with the eyes of some one who has had a
revelation. Of course. That was how it could be done. She herself,
she by herself, couldn’t afford it, and wouldn’t be able, even if
she could afford it, to go there all alone; but she and Mrs.
Arbuthnot together . . .She leaned across the table, “Why don’t we try and get it?”
she whispered.Mrs. Arbuthnot became even more wide-eyed. “Get it?” she
repeated.
“ Yes,” said Mrs. Wilkins, still as though she were afraid of
being overheard. “Not just sit here and say How wonderful, and then
go home to Hampstead without having put out a finger—go home just
as usual and see about the dinner and the fish just as we’ve been
doing for years and years and will go on doing for years and years.
In fact,” said Mrs. Wilkins, flushing to the roots of her hair, for
the sound of what she was saying, of what was coming pouring out,
frightened her, and yet she couldn’t stop, “I see no end to it.
There is no end to it. So that there ought to be a break, there
ought to be intervals—in everybody’s interests. Why, it would
really be being unselfish to go away and be happy for a little,
because we would come back so much nicer. You see, after a bit
everybody needs a holiday.”
“ But—how do you mean, get it?” asked Mrs.
Arbuthnot.
“ Take it,” said Mrs. Wilkins.
“ Take it?”
“ Rent it. Hire it. Have it.”
“ But—do you mean you and I?”
“ Yes. Between us. Share. Then it would only cost half, and
you look so—you look exactly as if you wanted it just as much as I
do—as if you ought to have a rest—have something happy happen to
you.”
“ Why, but we don’t know each other.”
“ But just think how well we would if we went away together
for a month! And I’ve saved for a rainy day, and I expect so have
you, and thisisthe rainy
day—look at it—”
“ She is unbalanced,” thought Mrs. Arbuthnot; yet she felt
strangely stirred.
“ Think of getting away for a whole month—from everything—to
heaven—”
“ She shouldn’t say things like that,” thought Mrs.
Arbuthnot. “The vicar—” Yet she felt strangely stirred. It would
indeed be wonderful to have a rest, a cessation.Habit, however, steadied her again; and years of intercourse
with the poor made her say, with the slight though sympathetic
superiority of the explainer, “But then, you see, heaven isn’t
somewhere else. It is here and now. We are told so.”She became very earnest, just as she did when trying
patiently to help and enlighten the poor. “Heaven is within us,”
she said in her gentle low voice. “We are told that on the very
highest authority. And you know the lines about the kindred points,
don’t you—”
“ Oh yes, I knowthem,”
interrupted Mrs. Wilkins impatiently.
“ The kindred points of heaven and home,” continued Mrs.
Arbuthnot, who was used to finishing her sentences. “Heaven is in
our home.”
“ It isn’t,” said Mrs. Wilkins, again
surprisingly.Mrs. Arbuthnot was taken aback. Then she said gently, “Oh,
but it is. It is there if we choose, if we make it.”
“ I do choose, and I do make it, and it isn’t,” said Mrs.
Wilkins.Then Mrs. Arbuthnot was silent, for she too sometimes had
doubts about homes. She sat and looked uneasily at Mrs. Wilkins,
feeling more and more the urgent need to getting her classified. If
she could only classify Mrs. Wilkins, get her safely under her
proper heading, she felt that she herself would regain her balance,
which did seem very strangely to be slipping all to one side. For
neither had she had a holiday for years, and the advertisement when
she saw it had set her dreaming, and Mrs. Wilkins’s excitement
about it was infectious, and she had the sensation, as she listened
to her impetuous, odd talk and watched her lit-up face, that she
was being stirred out of sleep.Clearly Mrs. Wilkins was unbalanced, but Mrs. Arbuthnot had
met the unbalanced before—indeed she was always meeting them—and
they had no effect on her own stability at all; whereas this one
was making her feel quite wobbly, quite as though to be off and
away, away from her compass points of God, Husband, Home and
Duty—she didn’t feel as if Mrs. Wilkins intended Mr. Wilkins to
come too—and just for once be happy, would be both good and
desirable. Which of course it wasn’t; which certainly of course it
wasn’t. She, also, had a nest-egg, invested gradually in the Post
Office Savings Bank, but to suppose that she would ever forget her
duty to the extent of drawing it out and spending it on herself was
surely absurd. Surely she couldn’t, she wouldn’t ever do such a
thing? Surely she wouldn’t, she couldn’t ever forget her poor,
forget misery and sickness as completely as that? No doubt a trip
to Italy would be extraordinarily delightful, but there were many
delightful things one would like to do, and what was strength given
to one for except to help one not to do them?Steadfast as the points of the compass to Mrs. Arbuthnot were
the great four facts of life: God, Husband, Home, Duty. She had
gone to sleep on these facts years ago, after a period of much
misery, her head resting on them as on a pillow; and she had a
great dread of being awakened out of so simple and untroublesome a
condition. Therefore it was that she searched with earnestness for
a heading under which to put Mrs. Wilkins, and in this way illumine
and steady her own mind; and sitting there looking at her uneasily
after her last remark, and feeling herself becoming more and more
unbalanced and infected, she decidedpro
tem, as the vicar said at meetings, to put her
under the heading Nerves. It was just possible that she ought to go
straight into the category Hysteria, which was often only the
antechamber to Lunacy, but Mrs. Arbuthnot had learned not to hurry
people into their final categories, having on more than one
occasion discovered with dismay that she had made a mistake; and
how difficult it had been to get them out again, and how crushed
she had been with the most terrible remorse.Yes. Nerves. Probably she had no regular work for others,
thought Mrs. Arbuthnot; no work that would take her outside
herself. Evidently she was rudderless—blown about by gusts, by
impulses. Nerves was almost certainly her category, or would be
quite soon if no one helped her. Poor little thing, thought Mrs.
Arbuthnot, her own balance returning hand in hand with her
compassion, and unable, because of the table, to see the length of
Mrs. Wilkins’s legs. All she saw was her small, eager, shy face,
and her thin shoulders, and the look of childish longing in her
eyes for something that she was sure was going to make her happy.
No; such things didn’t make people happy, such fleeting things.
Mrs. Arbuthnot had learned in her long life with Frederick—he was
her husband, and she had married him at twenty and was not
thirty-three—where alone true joys are to be found. They are to be
found, she now knew, only in daily, in hourly, living for others;
they are to be found only—hadn’t she over and over again taken her
disappointments and discouragements there, and come away
comforted?—at the feet of God.Frederick had been the kind of husband whose wife betakes
herself early to the feet of God. From him to them had been a short
though painful step. It seemed short to her in retrospect, but it
had really taken the whole of the first year of their marriage, and
every inch of the way had been a struggle, and every inch of it was
stained, she felt at the time, with her heart’s blood. All that was
over now. She had long since found peace. And Frederick, from her
passionately loved bridegroom, from her worshipped young husband,
had become second only to God on her list of duties and
forbearances. There he hung, the second in importance, a bloodless
thing bled white by her prayers. For years she had been able to be
happy only by forgetting happiness. She wanted to stay like that.
She wanted to shut out everything that would remind her of
beautiful things, that might set her off again long, desiring . .
.
“ I’d like so much to be friends,” she said earnestly. “Won’t
you come and see me, or let me come to you sometimes? Whenever you
feel as if you wanted to talk. I’ll give you my address”—she
searched in her handbag—“and then you won’t forget.” And she found
a card and held it out.Mrs. Wilkins ignored the card.
“ It’s so funny,” said Mrs. Wilkins, just as if she had not
heard her, “But Iseeus
both—you and me—this April in the mediaeval castle.”Mrs. Arbuthnot relapsed into uneasiness. “Do you?” she said,
making an effort to stay balanced under the visionary gaze of the
shining grey eyes. “Do you?”
“ Don’t you ever see things in a kind of flash before they
happen?” asked Mrs. Wilkins.
“ Never,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot.She tried to smile; she tried to smile the sympathetic yet
wise and tolerant smile with which she was accustomed to listen to
the necessarily biased and incomplete view of the poor. She didn’t
succeed. The smile trembled out.
“ Of course,” she said in a low voice, almost as if she were
afraid the vicar and the Savings Bank were listening, “it would be
most beautiful—most beautiful—”
“ Even if it were wrong,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “it would only
be for a month.”
“ That—” began Mrs. Arbuthnot, quite clear as to the
reprehensibleness of such a point of view; but Mrs. Wilkins stopped
her before she could finish.
“ Anyhow,” said Mrs. Wilkins, stopping her, “I’m sure it’s
wrong to go on being good for too long, till one gets miserable.
And I can see you’ve been good for years and years, because you
look so unhappy”— Mrs. Arbuthnot opened her mouth to protest—“and
I—I’ve done nothing but duties, things for other people, ever since
I was a girl, and I don’t believe anybody loves me a bit—a bit—the
b-better—and I long— oh, I long—for something else—something
else—”Was she going to cry? Mrs. Arbuthnot became acutely
uncomfortable and sympathetic. She hoped she wasn’t going to cry.
Not there. Not in that unfriendly room, with strangers coming and
going.But Mrs. Wilkins, after tugging agitatedly at a handkerchief
that wouldn’t come out of her pocket, did succeed at last in merely
apparently blowing her nose with it, and then, blinking her eyes
very quickly once or twice, looked at Mrs. Arbuthnot with a
quivering air of half humble, half frightened apology, and
smiled.
“ Will you believe,” she whispered, trying to steady her
mouth, evidently dreadfully ashamed of herself, “that I’ve never
spoken to any one before in my life like this? I can’t think, I
simply don’t know, what has come over me.”
“ It’s the advertisement,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, nodding
gravely.
“ Yes,” said Mrs. Wilkins, dabbing furtively at her eyes,
“and us both being so—”—she blew her nose again a
little—“miserable.”
Chapter 2
Of course Mrs. Arbuthnot was not miserable—how could she be,
she asked herself, when God was taking care of her?—but she let
that pass for the moment unrepudiated, because of her conviction
that here was another fellow-creature in urgent need of her help;
and not just boots and blankets and better sanitary arrangements
this time, but the more delicate help of comprehension, of finding
the exact right words.
The exact right words, she presently discovered, after trying
various ones about living for others, and prayer, and the peace to
be found in placing oneself unreservedly in God’s hands—to meet all
these words Mrs. Wilkins had other words, incoherent and yet, for
the moment at least, till one had had more time, difficult to
answer—the exact right words were a suggestion that it would do no
harm to answer the advertisement. Non-committal. Mere inquiry. And
what disturbed Mrs. Arbuthnot about this suggestion was that she
did not make it solely to comfort Mrs. Wilkins; she made it because
of her own strange longing for the mediaeval castle.
This was very disturbing. There she was, accustomed to
direct, to lead, to advise, to support—except Frederick; she long
since had learned to leave Frederick to God—being led herself,
being influenced and thrown off her feet, by just an advertisement,
by just an incoherent stranger. It was indeed disturbing. She
failed to understand her sudden longing for what was, after all,
self-indulgence, when for years no such desire had entered her
heart.
“ There’s no harm in simplyasking,” she said in a low voice, as if the vicar and the Savings
Bank and all her waiting and dependent poor were listening and
condemning.
“ It isn’t as if itcommittedus to
anything,” said Mrs. Wilkins, also in a low voice, but her voice
shook.
They got up simultaneously—Mrs. Arbuthnot had a sensation of
surprise that Mrs. Wilkins should be so tall—and went to a
writing-table, and Mrs. Arbuthnot wrote to Z, Box 1000,The Times, for particulars. She asked for all
particulars, but the only one they really wanted was the one about
the rent. They both felt that it was Mrs. Arbuthnot who ought to
write the letter and do the business part. Not only was she used to
organizing and being practical, but she also was older, and
certainly calmer; and she herself had no doubt too that she was
wiser. Neither had Mrs. Wilkins any doubt of this; the very way
Mrs. Arbuthnot parted her hair suggested a great calm that could
only proceed from wisdom.
But if she was wiser, older and calmer, Mrs. Arbuthnot’s new
friend nevertheless seemed to her to be the one who impelled.
Incoherent, she yet impelled. She appeared to have, apart from her
need of help, an upsetting kind of character. She had a curious
infectiousness. She led one on. And the way her unsteady mind
leaped at conclusions—wrong ones, of course; witness the one that
she, Mrs. Arbuthnot, was miserable—the way she leaped at
conclusions was disconcerting.
Whatever she was, however, and whatever her unsteadiness,
Mrs. Arbuthnot found herself sharing her excitement and her
longing; and when the letter had been posted in the letter-box in
the hall and actually was beyond getting back again, both she and
Mrs. Wilkins felt the same sense of guilt.
“ It only shows,” said Mrs. Wilkins in a whisper, as they
turned away from the letter-box, “how immaculately good we’ve been
all our lives. The very first time we do anything our husbands
don’t know about we feel guilty.”
“ I’m afraid I can’t say I’ve been immaculately good,” gently
protested Mrs. Arbuthnot, a little uncomfortable at this fresh
example of successful leaping at conclusions, for she had not said
a word about her feeling of guilt.
“ Oh, but I’m sure you have—Iseeyou being good—and that’s why you’re not happy.”
“ She shouldn’t say things like that,” thought Mrs.
Arbuthnot. “I must try and help her not to.”
Aloud she said gravely, “I don’t know why you insist that I’m
not happy. When you know me better I think you’ll find that I am.
And I’m sure you don’t mean really that goodness, if one could
attain it, makes one unhappy.”
“ Yes, I do,” said Mrs. Wilkins. “Our sort of goodness does.
We have attained it, and we are unhappy. There are miserable sorts
of goodness and happy sorts—the sort we’ll have at the mediaeval
castle, for instance, is the happy sort.”
“ That is, supposing we go there,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot
restrainingly. She felt that Mrs. Wilkins needed holding on to.
“After all, we’ve only written just to ask. Anybody may do that. I
think it quite likely we shall find the conditions impossible, and
even if they were not, probably by to-morrow we shall not want to
go.”
“ Iseeus there,” was Mrs.
Wilkins’s answer to that.
All this was very unbalancing. Mrs. Arbuthnot, as she
presently splashed though the dripping streets on her way to a
meeting she was to speak at, was in an unusually disturbed
condition of mind. She had, she hoped, shown herself very calm to
Mrs. Wilkins, very practical and sober, concealing her own
excitement. But she was really extraordinarily moved, and she felt
happy, and she felt guilty, and she felt afraid, and she had all
the feelings, though this she did not know, of a woman who was come
away from a secret meeting with her lover. That, indeed, was what
she looked like when she arrived late on her platform; she, the
open-browed, looked almost furtive as her eyes fell on the staring
wooden faces waiting to hear her try and persuade them to
contribute to the alleviation of the urgent needs of the Hampstead
poor, each one convinced that they needed contributions themselves.
She looked as though she were hiding something discreditable but
delightful. Certainly her customary clear expression of candor was
not there, and its place was taken by a kind of suppressed and
frightened pleasedness, which would have led a more worldly-minded
audience to the instant conviction of recent and probably
impassioned lovemaking.
Beauty, beauty, beauty . . . the words kept ringing in her
ears as she stood on the platform talking of sad things to the
sparsely attended meeting. She had never been to Italy. Was that
really what her nest-egg was to be spent on after all? Though she
couldn’t approve of the way Mrs. Wilkins was introducing the idea
of predestination into her immediate future, just as if she had no
choice, just as if to struggle, or even to reflect, were useless,
it yet influenced her. Mrs. Wilkins’s eyes had been the eyes of a
seer. Some people were like that, Mrs. Arbuthnot knew; and if Mrs.
Wilkins had actually seen her at the mediaeval castle it did seem
probable that struggling would be a waste of time. Still, to spend
her nest-egg on self-indulgence— The origin of this egg had been
corrupt, but she had at least supposed its end was to be
creditable. Was she to deflect it from its intended destination,
which alone had appeared to justify her keeping it, and spend it on
giving herself pleasure?
Mrs. Arbuthnot spoke on and on, so much practiced in the kind
of speech that she could have said it all in her sleep, and at the
end of the meeting, her eyes dazzled by her secret visions, she
hardly noticed that nobody was moved in any way whatever, least of
all in the way of contributions.
But the vicar noticed. The vicar was disappointed. Usually
his good friend and supporter Mrs. Arbuthnot succeeded better than
this. And, what was even more unusual, she appeared, he observed,
not even to mind.
“ I can’t imagine,” he said to her as they parted, speaking
irritably, for he was irritated both by the audience and by her,
“what these people are coming to.Nothingseems to move them.”
“ Perhaps they need a holiday,” suggested Mrs. Arbuthnot; an
unsatisfactory, a queer reply, the vicar thought.
“ In February?” he called after her sarcastically.
“ Oh no—not till April,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot over her
shoulder.
“ Very odd,” thought the vicar. “Very odd indeed.” And he
went home and was not perhaps quite Christian to his wife.
That night in her prayers Mrs. Arbuthnot asked for guidance.
She felt she ought really to ask, straight out and roundly, that
the mediaeval castle should already have been taken by some one
else and the whole thing thus be settled, but her courage failed
her. Suppose her prayer were to be answered? No; she couldn’t ask
it; she couldn’t risk it. And after all—she almost pointed this out
to God—if she spent her present nest-egg on a holiday she could
quite soon accumulate another. Frederick pressed money on her; and
it would only mean, while she rolled up a second egg, that for a
time her contributions to the parish charities would be less. And
then it could be the next nest-egg whose original corruption would
be purged away by the use to which it was finally put.
For Mrs. Arbuthnot, who had no money of her own, was obliged
to live on the proceeds of Frederick’s activities, and her very
nest-egg was the fruit, posthumously ripened, of ancient sin. The
way Frederick made his living was one of the standing distresses of
her life. He wrote immensely popular memoirs, regularly, every
year, of the mistresses of kings. There were in history numerous
kings who had had mistresses, and there were still more numerous
mistresses who had had kings; so that he had been able to publish a
book of memoirs during each year of his married life, and even so
there were greater further piles of these ladies waiting to be
dealt with. Mrs. Arbuthnot was helpless. Whether she liked it or
not, she was obliged to live on the proceeds. He gave her a
dreadful sofa once, after the success of his Du Barri memoir, with
swollen cushions and soft, receptive lap, and it seemed to her a
miserable thing that there, in her very home, should flaunt this
re-incarnation of a dead old French sinner.
Simply good, convinced that morality is the basis of
happiness, the fact that she and Frederick should draw their
sustenance from guilt, however much purged by the passage of
centuries, was one of the secret reasons of her sadness. The more
the memoired lady had forgotten herself, the more his book about
her was read and the more free-handed he was to his wife; and all
that he gave her was spent, after adding slightly to her
nest-egg—for she did hope and believe that some day people would
cease to want to read of wickedness, and then Frederick would need
supporting—on helping the poor. The parish flourished because, to
take a handful at random, of the ill-behavior of the ladies Du
Barri, Montespan, Pompadour, Ninon de l’Enclos, and even of learned
Maintenon. The poor were the filter through which the money was
passed, to come out, Mrs. Arbuthnot hoped, purified. She could do
no more. She had tried in days gone by to think the situation out,
to discover the exact right course for her to take, but had found
it, as she had found Frederick, too difficult, and had left it, as
she had left Frederick, to God. Nothing of this money was spent on
her house or dress; those remained, except for the great soft sofa,
austere. It was the poor who profited. Their very boots were stout
with sins. But how difficult it had been. Mrs. Arbuthnot, groping
for guidance, prayed about it to exhaustion. Ought she perhaps to
refuse to touch the money, to avoid it as she would have avoided
the sins which were its source? But then what about the parish’s
boots? She asked the vicar what he thought, and through much
delicate language, evasive and cautious, it did finally appear that
he was for the boots.
At least she had persuaded Frederick, when first he began his
terrible successful career—he only began it after their marriage;
when she married him he had been a blameless official attached to
the library of the British Museum—to publish the memoirs under
another name, so that she was not publicly branded. Hampstead read
the books with glee, and had no idea that their writer lived in its
midst. Frederick was almost unknown, even by sight, in Hampstead.
He never went to any of its gatherings. Whatever it was he did in
the way of recreation was done in London, but he never spoke of
what he did or whom he saw; he might have been perfectly friendless
for any mention he ever made of friends to his wife. Only the vicar
knew where the money for the parish came from, and he regarded it,
he told Mrs. Arbuthnot, as a matter of honour not to mention
it.
And at least her little house was not haunted by the loose
lived ladies, for Frederick did his work away from home. He had two
rooms near the British Museum, which was the scene of his
exhumations, and there he went every morning, and he came back long
after his wife was asleep. Sometimes he did not come back at all.
Sometimes she did not see him for several days together. Then he
would suddenly appear at breakfast, having let himself in with his
latchkey the night before, very jovial and good-natured and
free-handed and glad if she would allow him to give her something—a
well-fed man, contented with the world; a jolly, full-blooded,
satisfied man. And she was always gentle, and anxious that his
coffee should be as he liked it.
He seemed very happy. Life, she often thought, however much
one tabulated was yet a mystery. There were always some people it
was impossible to place. Frederick was one of them. He didn’t seem
to bear the remotest resemblance to the original Frederick. He
didn’t seem to have the least need of any of the things he used to
say were so important and beautiful—love, home, complete communion
of thoughts, complete immersion in each other’s interests. After
those early painful attempts to hold him up to the point from which
they had hand in hand so splendidly started, attempts in which she
herself had got terribly hurt and the Frederick she supposed she
had married was mangled out of recognition, she hung him up finally
by her bedside as the chief subject of her prayers, and left him,
except for those, entirely to God. She had loved Frederick too
deeply to be able now to do anything but pray for him. He had no
idea that he never went out of the house without her blessing going
with him too, hovering, like a little echo of finished love, round
that once dear head. She didn’t dare think of him as he used to be,
as he had seemed to her to be in those marvelous first days of
their love-making, of their marriage. Her child had died; she had
nothing, nobody of her own to lavish herself on. The poor became
her children, and God the object of her love. What could be happier
than such a life, she sometimes asked herself; but her face, and
particularly her eyes, continued sad.
“ Perhaps when we’re old . . . perhaps when we are both quite
old . . .” she would think wistfully.
Chapter 3
The owner of the mediaeval castle was an Englishman, a Mr.
Briggs, who was in London at the moment and wrote that it had beds
enough for eight people, exclusive of servants, three
sitting-rooms, battlements, dungeons, and electric light. The rent
was £60 for the month, the servants’ wages were extra, and he
wanted references—he wanted assurances that the second half of his
rent would be paid, the first half being paid in advance, and he
wanted assurances of respectability from a solicitor, or a doctor,
or a clergyman. He was very polite in his letter, explaining that
his desire for references was what was usual and should be regarded
as a mere formality.
Mrs. Arbuthnot and Mrs. Wilkins had not thought of
references, and they had not dreamed a rent could be so high. In
their minds had floated sums like three guineas a week; or less,
seeing that the place was small and old.
Sixty pounds for a single month.
It staggered them.
Before Mrs. Arbuthnot’s eyes rose up boots: endless vistas,
all the stout boots that sixty pounds would buy; and besides the
rent there would be the servants’ wages and the food, and the
railway journeys out and home. While as for references, these did
indeed seem a stumbling-block; it did seem impossible to give any
without making their plan more public than they had
intended.
