‘Yes,’ I agreed; and thought ruefully of some of my own.
This, however, only made me if anything more inquisitive as to the exact nature and quality of Dolly’s resemblance to her name. We all, I suppose (except Mrs. Barnes, who I am sure hasn’t), have been rash, and if we could induce ourselves to be frank much innocent amusement might be got by comparing the results of our rashnesses. But Mrs. Barnes was unable at the moment to induce herself to be frank, and she returned to the subject she has already treated very fully since her arrival, the wonderful bracing air up here and her great and grateful appreciation of it.
To-day is Tuesday; and on Saturday evening, — the day they arrived back again, complete with their luggage, which came up in a cart round by the endless zigzags of the road while they with their peculiar dauntlessness took the steep short cuts, — we had what might be called an exchange of cards. Mrs. Barnes told me what she thought fit for me to know about her late husband, and I responded by telling her and her sister what I thought fit for them to know of my uncle the Dean.
There is such a lot of him that is fit to know that it took some time. He was a great convenience. How glad I am I’ve got him. A dean, after all, is of an impressive respectability as a relation. His apron covers a multitude of family shortcomings. You can hold him up to the light, and turn him round, and view him from every angle, and there is nothing about him that doesn’t bear inspection. All my relations aren’t like that. One at least, though he denies it, wasn’t even born in wedlock. We’re not sure about the others, but we’re quite sure about this one, that he wasn’t born altogether as he ought to have been. Except for his obstinacy in denial he is a very attractive person. My uncle can’t be got to see that he exists. This makes him not able to like my uncle.
I didn’t go beyond the Dean on Saturday night, for he had a most satisfying effect on my new friends. Mrs. Barnes evidently thinks highly of deans, and Mrs. Jewks, though she said nothing, smiled very pleasantly while I held him up to view. No Lord Mayor was produced on their side. I begin to think there isn’t one. I begin to think their self-respect is simply due to the consciousness that they are British. Not that Mrs. Jewks says anything about it, but she smiles while Mrs. Barnes talks on immensely patriotic lines. I gather they haven’t been in England for some time, so that naturally their affection for their country has been fanned into a great glow. I know all about that sort of glow. I have had it each time I’ve been out of England.
August 20th.
Mrs. Barnes elaborated the story of him she speaks of always as Mr. Barnes to-day.
He was, she said, a business man, and went to the city every day, where he did things with hides: dried skins, I understood, that he bought and resold. And though Mr. Barnes drew his sustenance from these hides with what seemed to Mrs. Barnes great ease and abundance while he was alive, after his death it was found that, through no fault of his own but rather, she suggested, to his credit, he had for some time past been living on his capital. This capital came to an end almost simultaneously with Mr. Barnes, and all that was left for Mrs. Barnes to live on was the house at Dulwich, handsomely furnished, it was true, with everything of the best; for Mr. Barnes had disliked what Mrs. Barnes called fandangles, and was all for mahogany and keeping a good table. But you can’t live on mahogany, said Mrs. Barnes, nor keep a good table with nothing to keep it on, so she wished to sell the house and retire into obscurity on the proceeds. Her brother-in-law, however, suggested paying guests; so would she be able to continue in her home, even if on a slightly different basis. Many people at that period were beginning to take in paying guests. She would not, he thought, lose caste. Especially if she restricted herself to real gentlefolk, who wouldn’t allow her to feel her position.
It was a little difficult at first, but she got used to it and was doing very well when the war broke out. Then, of course, she had to stand by Dolly. So she gave up her house and guests, and her means were now very small; for somehow, remarked Mrs. Barnes, directly one wants to sell nobody seems to want to buy, and she had had to let her beautiful house go for very little —
‘But why—’ I interrupted; and pulled myself up.
I was just going to ask why Dolly hadn’t gone to Mrs. Barnes and helped with the paying guests, instead of Mrs. Barnes giving them up and going to Dolly; but I stopped because I thought perhaps such a question, seeing that they quite remarkably refrain from asking me questions, might have been a little indiscreet at our present stage of intimacy. No, I can’t call it intimacy, — friendship, then. No, I can’t call it friendship either, yet; the only word at present is acquaintanceship.
August 21st.
The conduct of my guests is so extraordinarily discreet, their careful avoidance of curiosity, of questions, is so remarkable, that I can but try to imitate. They haven’t asked me a single thing. I positively thrust the Dean on them. They make no comment on anything either, except the situation and the view. We seem to talk if not only certainly chiefly about that. We haven’t even got to books yet. I still don’t know about The Rosary. Once or twice when I have been alone with Mrs. Barnes she has begun to talk of Dolly, who appears to fill most of her thoughts, but each time she has broken off in the middle and resumed her praises of the situation and the view. I haven’t been alone at all yet with Dolly; nor, though Mr. Barnes has been dwelt upon in detail, have I been told anything about Mr. Jewks.
August 22nd.
Impetuosity sometimes gets the better of me, and out begins to rush a question; but up to now I have succeeded in catching it and strangling it before it is complete. For perhaps my new friends have been very unhappy, just as I have been very unhappy, and they may be struggling out of it just as I am, still with places in their memories that hurt too much for them to dare to touch. Perhaps it is only by silence and reserve that they can manage to be brave.
There are no signs, though, of anything of the sort on their composed faces; but then neither, I think, would they see any signs of such things on mine. The moment as it passes is, I find, somehow a gay thing. Somebody says something amusing, and I laugh; somebody is kind, and I am happy. Just the smell of a flower, the turn of a sentence, anything, the littlest thing, is enough to make the passing moment gay to me. I am sure my guests can’t tell by looking at me that I have ever been anything but cheerful; and so I, by looking at them, wouldn’t be able to say that they have ever been anything but composed, — Mrs. Barnes composed and grave, Mrs. Jewks composed and smiling.
But I refuse now to jump at conclusions in the nimble way I used to. Even about Mrs. Barnes, who would seem to be an untouched monument of tranquillity, a cave of calm memories, I can no longer be sure. And so we sit together quietly on the terrace, and are as presentable as so many tidy, white-curtained houses in a decent street. We don’t know what we’ve got inside us each of disorder, of discomfort, of anxieties. Perhaps there is nothing; perhaps my friends are as tidy and quiet inside as out. Anyhow up to now we have kept ourselves to ourselves, as Mrs. Barnes would say, and we make a most creditable show.
Only I don’t believe in that keeping oneself to oneself attitude. Life is too brief to waste any of it being slow in making friends. I have a theory — Mrs. Barnes isn’t the only one of us three who has theories — that reticence is a stuffy, hampering thing. Except about one’s extremest bitter grief, which is, like one’s extremest joy of love, too deeply hidden away with God to be told of, one should be without reserves. And if one makes mistakes, and if the other person turns out to have been unworthy of being treated frankly and goes away and distorts, it can’t be helped, — one just takes the risk. For isn’t anything better than distrust, and the slowness and selfish fear of caution? Isn’t anything better than not doing one’s fellow creatures the honour of taking it for granted that they are, women and all, gentlemen? Besides, how lonely....
August 23rd.
The sun goes on blazing, and we go on sitting in the shade in a row.
Mrs. Barnes does a great deal of kn
itting. She knits socks for soldiers all day. She got into this habit during the war, when she sent I don’t know how many pairs a year to the trenches, and now she can’t stop. I suppose these will go to charitable institutions, for although the war has left off there are, as Mrs. Jewks justly said, still legs in the world.
This remark I think came under the heading Dolly in Mrs. Barnes’s mind, for she let her glance rest a moment on her sister in a kind of affectionate concern.
Mrs. Jewks hasn’t said much yet, but each time she has said anything I have liked it. Usually she murmurs, almost as if she didn’t want Mrs. Barnes to hear, yet couldn’t help saying what she says. She too knits, but only, I think, because her sister likes to see her sitting beside her doing it, and never for long at a time. Her chief occupation, I have discovered, is to read aloud to Mrs. Barnes.
This wasn’t done in my presence the first four days out of consideration for me, for everybody doesn’t like being read to, Mrs. Barnes explained afterwards; but they went upstairs after lunch to their rooms, — to sleep, as I supposed, knowing how well they do that, and it was only gradually that I realised, from the monotonous gentle drone coming through the window to where I lay below on the grass, that it wasn’t Mrs. Barnes giving long drawn-out counsel to Mrs. Jewks on the best way to cope with the dangers of being Dolly, but that it was Mrs. Jewks reading aloud.
After that I suggested they should do this on the terrace, where it is so much cooler than anywhere else in the afternoon; so now, reassured that it in no way disturbs me — Mrs. Barnes’s politeness and sense of duty as a guest never flags for a moment — this is what happens, and it happens in the mornings also. For, says Mrs. Barnes, how much better it is to study what persons of note have said than waste the hours of life saying things oneself.
They read biographies and histories, but only those, I gather, that are not recent; and sometimes, Mrs. Barnes said, they lighten what Mrs. Jewks described in a murmur as these more solid forms of fiction by reading a really good novel.
I asked Mrs. Barnes with much interest about the novel. What were the really good ones they had read? And I hung on the answer, for here was something we could talk about that wasn’t either the situation or the view and yet was discreet.
‘Ah,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘there are very few really good novels. We don’t care, of course, except for the very best, and they don’t appear to be printed nowadays.’
‘I expect the very best are unprintable,’ murmured Mrs. Jewks, her head bent over her knitting, for it was one of the moments when she too was engaged on socks.
‘There used to be very good novels,’ continued Mrs. Barnes, who hadn’t I think heard her, ‘but of recent years they have indeed been few. I begin to fear we shall never again see a Thackeray or a Trollope. And yet I have a theory — and surely these two writers prove it — that it is possible to be both wholesome and clever.’
‘I don’t want to see any more Thackerays and Trollopes,’ murmured Mrs. Jewks. ‘I’ve seen them. Now I want to see something different.’
This sentence was too long for Mrs. Barnes not to notice, and she looked at me as one who should say, ‘There. What did I tell you? Her name unsettles her.’
There was a silence.
‘Our father,’ then said Mrs. Barnes, with so great a gravity of tone that for a moment I thought she was unaccountably and at eleven o’clock in the morning going to embark on the Lord’s Prayer, ‘knew Thackeray. He mixed with him.’
And as I wasn’t quite sure whether this was a rebuke for Dolly or information for me, I kept quiet.
As, however, Mrs. Barnes didn’t continue, I began to feel that perhaps I was expected to say something. So I did.
‘That,’ I said, ‘must have been very—’
I searched round for an enthusiastic word, but couldn’t find one. It is unfortunate how I can never think of any words more enthusiastic than what I am feeling. They seem to disappear; and urged by politeness, or a desire to please, I frantically hunt for them in a perfectly empty mind. The nearest approach to one that I found this morning was Enjoyable. I don’t think much of Enjoyable. It is a watery word; but it was all I found, so I said it. ‘That must have been very enjoyable,’ I said; and even I could hear that my voice was without excitement.
Mrs. Jewks looked at me and smiled.
‘It was more than enjoyable,’ said Mrs. Barnes, ‘it was elevating. Dolly used to feel just as I do about it,’ she added, her eye reproachfully on her sister. ‘It is not Thackeray’s fault that she no longer does.’
‘It’s only because I’ve finished with him,’ said Mrs. Jewks apologetically. ‘Now I want something different.’
‘Dolly and I,’ explained Mrs. Barnes to me, ‘don’t always see alike. I have a theory that one doesn’t finish with the Immortals.’
‘Would you put Thackeray—’ I began diffidently.
Mrs. Barnes stopped me at once.
‘Our father,’ she said — again my hands instinctively wanted to fold— ‘who was an excellent judge, indeed a specialist if I may say so, placed him among the Immortals. Therefore I am content to leave him there.’
‘But isn’t that filial piety rather than—’ I began again, still diffident but also obstinate.
‘In any case,’ interrupted Mrs. Barnes, raising her hand as though I were the traffic, ‘I shall never forget the influence he and the other great writers of the period had upon the boys.’
‘The boys?’ I couldn’t help inquiring, in spite of this being an interrogation.
‘Our father educated boys. On an unusual and original system. Being devoid of the classics, which he said was all the better because then he hadn’t to spend any time remembering them, he was a devoted English linguist. Accordingly he taught boys English, — foreign boys, because English boys naturally know it already, and his method was to make them minutely acquainted with the great novels, — the great wholesome novels of that period. Not a French, or Dutch, or Italian boy but went home—’
‘Or German,’ put in Mrs. Jewks. ‘Most of them were Germans.’
Mrs. Barnes turned red. ‘Let us forget them,’ she said, with a wave of her hand. ‘It is my earnest desire,’ she continued, looking at me, ‘to forget Germans.’
‘Do let us,’ I said politely.
‘Not one of the boys,’ she then went on, ‘but returned to his country with a knowledge of the colloquial English of the best period, and of the noble views of that period as expressed by the noblest men, unobtainable by any other method. Our father called himself a Non-Grammarian. The boys went home knowing no rules of grammar, yet unable to talk incorrectly. Thackeray himself was the grammar, and his characters the teachers. And so was Dickens, but not quite to the same extent, because of people like Sam Weller who might have taught the boys slang. Thackeray was immensely interested when our father wrote and told him about the school, and once when he was in London he invited him to lunch.’
Not quite clear as to who was in London and which invited which, I said, ‘Who?’
‘It was our father who went to London,’ said Mrs. Barnes, ‘and was most kindly entertained by Thackeray.’
‘He went because he wasn’t there already,’ explained Mrs. Jewks.
‘Dolly means,’ said Mrs. Barnes, ‘that he did not live in London. Our father was an Oxford man. Not in the narrow, technical meaning that has come to be attached to the term, but in the simple natural sense of living there. It was there that we were born, and there that we grew up in an atmosphere of education. We saw it all round us going on in the different colleges, and we saw it in detail and at first hand in our own home. For we too were brought up on Thackeray and Dickens, in whom our father said we would find everything girls needed to know and nothing that, they had better not.’
‘I used to have a perfect itch,’ murmured Mrs. Jewks, ‘to know the things I had better not.’
And Mrs. Barnes again looked at me as one who should say, ‘There. What did I tell you? Such a
word, too. Itch.’
There was a silence. I could think of nothing to say that wouldn’t appear either inquisitive or to be encouraging Dolly.
Mrs. Barnes sits between us. This arrangement of our chairs on the grass happened apparently quite naturally the first day, and now has become one that I feel I mustn’t disturb. For me to drop into the middle chair would somehow now be impossible. It is Mrs. Barnes’s place. Yet I do want to sit next to Mrs. Jewks and talk to her. Or better still, go for a walk with her. But Mrs. Barnes always goes for the walks, either with or without me, but never without Mrs. Jewks. She hasn’t yet left us once alone together. If anything needs fetching it is Mrs. Jewks who fetches it. They don’t seem to want to write letters, but if they did I expect they would both go in to write them at the same time.
I do think, though, that we are growing a little more intimate. At least to-day we have talked of something that wasn’t the view. I shouldn’t be surprised if in another week, supposing the hot weather lasts so long, I shall be asking Mrs. Barnes outright what it is Dolly did that has apparently so permanently unnerved her sister.
But suppose she retaliated by asking me, — oh, there are so many things she could ask me that I couldn’t answer! Except with the shameful, exposing answer of beginning very helplessly to cry....
August 24th.
Last night I ran after Mrs. Jewks just as she was disappearing into her room and said, ‘I’m going to call you Dolly. I don’t like Jewks. How do you spell it?’
‘What — Dolly?’ she asked, smiling.
‘No — Jewks.’
But Mrs. Barnes came out of her bedroom and said, ‘Did we forget to bid you goodnight? How very remiss of us.’
And we all smiled at each other, and went into our rooms, and shut the doors.
August 25th.
The behaviour of time is a surprising thing. I can’t think how it manages to make weeks sometimes seem like minutes and days sometimes seem like years. Those weeks I was here alone seemed not longer than a few minutes. These days since my guests came seem to have gone on for months.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 232