Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

‘Ah. So he was prevented, poor fellow, from having the honour of dying for England.’

  ‘Yes, Uncle Rudolph.’

  ‘Poor fellow. Poor fellow.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Poor fellow. Well, he was spared knowing what he had missed. At least he was spared that. And she — his poor wife — how did she take it?’

  ‘Well, I think.’

  ‘Yes. I can believe it. She wouldn’t — I am very sure she wouldn’t — intrude her sorrows selfishly on others.’

  It was at this point that I became aware my uncle had fallen in love. Up to this, oddly enough, it hadn’t dawned on me. Now it did more than dawned, it blazed.

  I looked at him with a new and startled interest. ‘Uncle Rudolph,’ I said impetuously, no longer a distrustful niece talking to an uncle she suspects, but an equal with an equal, a human being with another human being, ‘haven’t you ever thought of marrying again? It’s quite a long time now since Aunt Winifred—’

  ‘Thought?’ said my uncle, his voice sounding for the first time simply, ordinarily human, without a trace in it of the fatal pulpit flavour, ‘Thought? I’m always thinking of it.’

  And except for his apron and gaiters he might have been any ordinary solitary little man eating out his heart for a mate.

  ‘But then why don’t you? Surely a deanery of all places wants a wife in it?’

  ‘Of course it does Those strings or rooms — empty, echoing. It shouts for a wife. Shouts, I tell you. At least mine does. But I’ve never found — I hadn’t seen—’

  He broke off, biting at the stalk of grass.

  ‘But I remember you,’ I went on eagerly, ‘always surrounded by flocks of devoted women. Weren’t any of them — ?’

  ‘No,’ said my uncle shortly. And after a second of silence he said again, and so loud that I jumped, ‘No!’ And then he went on even more violently, ‘They didn’t give me a chance. They never let me alone a minute. After Winifred’s death they were like flies. Stuck to me — made me sick — great flies crawling—’ And he shuddered, and shook himself as though he were shaking off the lot of them.

  I looked at him in amazement. ‘Why,’ I cried, ‘you’re talking exactly like a man!’

  But he, staring at the view without seeing an inch of it, took no heed of me, and I heard him say under his breath as though I hadn’t been there at all, ‘My God, I’m so lonely at night!’

  That finished it. In that moment I began to love my uncle. At this authentic cry of forlornness I had great difficulty in not bending over and putting my arms round him, — just to comfort him, just to keep him warm. It must be a dreadful thing to be sixty and all alone. You look so grown up. You look as though you must have so many resources, so few needs; and you are accepted as provided for, what with your career accomplished, and your houses and servants and friends and books and all the rest of it — all the empty, meaningless rest of it; for really you are the most miserable of motherless cold babies, conscious that you are motherless, conscious that nobody soft and kind and adoring is ever again coming to croon over you and kiss you good-night and be there next morning to smile when you wake up.

  ‘Uncle Rudolph—’ I began.

  Then I stopped, and bending over took the stalk of grass he kept on biting out of his hand.

  ‘I can’t let you eat any more of that,’ I said. ‘It’s not good for you.’

  And having got hold of his hand I kept it.

  There now, I said, holding it tight.

  He looked up at me vaguely, absorbed in his thoughts; then, realising how tight his hand was being held, he smiled.

  ‘You dear child,’ he said, scanning my face as though he had never seen it before.

  ‘Yes?’ I said, smiling in my turn and not letting go of his hand. ‘I like that. I didn’t like any of the other dear children I was.’

  ‘Which other dear children?’

  ‘Uncle Rudolph,’ I said, ‘let’s go home. This is a bleak place. Why do we sit here shivering forlornly when there’s all that waiting for us down there?’

  And loosing his hand I got on to my feet, and when I was on them I held out both my hands to him and pulled him up, and he standing lower than where I was our eyes were then on a level.

  ‘All what?’ he asked, his eyes searching mine.

  ‘Oh, Uncle Rudolph! Warmth and Dolly, of course.’

  October 4th.

  But it hasn’t been quite so simple. Nothing last night was different. My uncle remained tongue-tied. Dolly sat waiting to smile at anecdotes that he never told. Mrs. Barnes knitted uneasily, already fearing, perhaps, because of his strange silence, that he somehow may have scented Siegfried, else how inexplicable his silence after that one bright, wonderful first evening and morning.

  It was I last night who did the talking, it was I who took up the line, abandoned by my uncle, of wholesome entertainment. I too told anecdotes; and when I had told all the ones I knew and still nobody said anything, I began to tell all the ones I didn’t know. Anything rather than that continued uncomfortable silence. But how very difficult it was. I grew quite damp with effort. And nobody except Dolly so much as smiled; and even Dolly, though she smiled, especially when I embarked on my second series of anecdotes, looked at me with a mild inquiry, as if she were wondering what was the matter with me.

  Wretched, indeed, is the hostess upon whose guests has fallen, from whatever cause, a blight.

  October 5th.

  Crabbe’s son, in the life he wrote of his father, asks: ‘Will it seem wonderful when we consider how he was situated at this time, that with a most affectionate heart, a peculiar attachment to female society, and with unwasted passions, Mr. Crabbe, though in his sixty-second year should have again thought of marriage? I feel satisfied that no one will be seriously shocked with such an evidence of the freshness of his feelings.’

  A little shocked; Crabbe’s son was prepared to allow this much; but not seriously.

  Well, it is a good thing my uncle didn’t live at that period, for it would have gone hard with him. His feelings are more than fresh, they are violent.

  October 6th.

  While Dolly is in the room Uncle Rudolph never moves, but sits tongue-tied staring at her. If she goes away he at once gets up and takes me by the arm and walks me off on to the terrace, where in a biting wind we pace up and down.

  Our positions are completely reversed. It is I now who am the wise old relative, counselling, encouraging, listening to outpours. Up and down we pace, up and down, very fast because of the freshness of Uncle’s Rudolph’s feelings and also of the wind, arm in arm, I trying to keep step, he not bothering about such things as step, absorbed in his condition, his hopes, his fears — especially his fears. For he is terrified lest, having at last found the perfect woman, she won’t have him. ‘Why should she?’ he asks almost angrily, ‘Why should she? Tell me why she should.’

  ‘I can’t tell you,’ I say, for Uncle Rudolph and I are now the frankest friends. ‘But I can’t tell you either why she shouldn’t. Think how nice you are, Uncle Rudolph. And Dolly is naturally very affectionate.’

  ‘She is perfect, perfect,’ vehemently declares my uncle.

  And Mrs. Barnes, who from the window watches us while we walk, looks with anxious questioning eyes at my face when we come in. What can my uncle have to talk about so eagerly to me when he is out on the terrace, and why does he stare in such stony silence at Dolly when he comes in? Poor Mrs. Barnes.

  October 7th.

  The difficulty about Dolly for courting purposes is that she is never to be got alone, not even into a corner out of earshot of Mrs. Barnes. Mrs. Barnes doesn’t go away for a moment, except together with Dolly. Wonderful how clever she is at it. She is obsessed by terror lest the horrid marriage to the German uncle should somehow be discovered. If she was afraid of my knowing it she is a hundred times more afraid of Uncle Rudolph’s knowing it. So persistent is her humility, so great and remote a dignitary does he seem to her, that the real situation
hasn’t even glimmered on her. All she craves is to keep this holy and distinguished man’s good opinion, to protect her Dolly, her darling erring one, from his just but unbearable contempt. Therefore she doesn’t budge. Dolly is never to be got alone.

  ‘A man,’ said my uncle violently to me this morning, ‘can’t propose to a woman before her sister.’

  ‘You’ve quite decided you’re going to?’ I asked, keeping up with him as best I could, trotting beside him up and down the terrace.

  ‘The minute I can catch her alone. I can’t stand any more of this. I must know. If she won’t have me — my God, if she won’t have me — !’

  I laid hold affectionately of his arm. ‘Oh, but she will,’ I said reassuringly. ‘Dolly is rather a creature of habit, you know.’

  ‘You mean she has got used to marriage—’

  ‘Well, I do think she is rather used to it. Uncle Rudolph,’ I went on, hesitating as I have hesitated a dozen times these last few days as to whether I oughtn’t to tell him about Juchs — Siegfried would be a shock, but Juchs would be crushing unless very carefully explained— ‘you don’t feel you don’t think you’d like to know something more about Dolly first? I mean before you propose?’

  ‘No!’ shouted my uncle.

  Afterwards he said more quietly that he could see through a brick wall as well as most men, and that Dolly wasn’t a brick wall but the perfect woman. What could be told him that he didn’t see for himself? Nothing, said my uncle.

  What can be done with a man in love? Nothing, say I.

  October 8th.

  Sometimes I feel very angry with Dolly that she should have got herself so tiresomely mixed up with Germans. How simple everything would be now if only she hadn’t! But when I am calm again I realise that she couldn’t help it. It is as natural to her to get mixed up as to breathe. Very sweet, affectionate natures are always getting mixed up. I suppose if it weren’t for Mrs. Barnes’s constant watchfulness and her own earnest desire never again to distress poor Kitty, she would at an early stage of their war wanderings have become some ardent Swiss hotelkeeper’s wife. Just to please him; just because else he would be miserable. Dolly ought to be married. It is the only certain way of saving her from marriage.

  October 9th.

  It is snowing. The wind howls, and the snow whirls, and we can’t go out and so get away from each other. Uncle Rudolph is obliged, when Dolly isn’t there, to continue sitting with Mrs. Barnes. He can’t to-day hurry me out on to the terrace. There’s only the hall in this house to sit in, for that place I pay the household books in is no more than a cupboard.

  Uncle Rudolph could just bear Mrs. Barnes when he could get away from her; to-day he can’t bear her at all. Everything that should be characteristic of a dean — patience, courtesy, kindliness, has been stripped off him by his eagerness to propose and the impossibility of doing it. There’s nothing at all left now of what he was but that empty symbol, his apron.

  October 10th.

  My uncle is fermenting with checked, prevented courting. And he ought to be back in England. He ought to have gone back almost at once, he says. He only came out for three or four days —

  ‘Yes; just time to settle me in,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, smiling, ‘and then take you home with me by the ear.’

  He has some very important meetings he is to preside at coming off soon, and here he is, hung up. It is Mrs. Barnes who is the cause of it, and naturally he isn’t very nice to her. In vain does she try to please him; the one thing he wants her to do, to go away and leave him with Dolly, she of course doesn’t. She sits there, saying meek things about the weather, expressing a modest optimism, ready to relinquish even that if my uncle differs, becoming, when he takes up a book, respectfully quiet, ready the moment he puts it down to rejoice with him if he wishes to rejoice or weep with him if he prefers weeping; and the more she is concerned to give satisfaction the less well-disposed is he towards her. He can’t forgive her inexplicable fixedness. Her persistent, unintermittent gregariousness is incomprehensible to him. All he wants, being reduced to simplicity by love, is to be left alone with Dolly. He can’t understand, being a man, why if he wants this he shouldn’t get it.

  ‘You’re not kind to Mrs. Barnes,’ I said to him this afternoon. ‘You’ve made her quite unnatural. She is cowed.’

  ‘I am unable to like her,’ said my uncle shortly.

  ‘You are quite wrong not to. She has had bitter troubles, and is all goodness. I don’t think I ever met anybody so completely unselfish.’

  ‘I wish she would go and be unselfish in her own room, then,’ said my uncle.

  ‘I don’t know you,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders. ‘You arrived here dripping unction and charitableness, and now—’

  ‘Why doesn’t she give me a chance?’ he cried. ‘She never budges. These women who stick, who can’t bear to be by themselves — good heavens, hasn’t she prayers she ought to be saying, and underclothes she ought to mend?’

  ‘I don’t believe you care so very much for Dolly after all,’ I said, ‘or you would be kind to the sister she is so deeply devoted to.’

  This sobered him. ‘I’ll try,’ said my uncle; and it was quite hard not to laugh at the change in our positions — I the grey-beard now, the wise rebuker, he the hot-headed yet well-intentioned young relative.

  October 11th.

  I think guests ought to like each other; love each other if they prefer it, but at least like. They too have their duties, and one of them is to resist nourishing aversions; or, if owing to their implacable dispositions they can’t help nourishing them, oughtn’t they to try very hard not to show it? They should consider the helpless position of the hostess, she who, at any rate theoretically, is bound to be equally attached to them all.

  Before my uncle came it is true we had begun to fester, but we festered nicely. Mrs. Barnes and I did it with every mark of consideration and politeness. We were ladies. Uncle Rudolph is no lady; and this little house, which I daresay looks a picture of peace from outside with the snow falling on its roof and the firelight shining in its windows, seethes with elemental passions. Fear, love, anger — they all dwell in it now, all brought into it by him, all coming out of the mixture, so innocuous one would think, so likely, one would think, to produce only the fruits of the spirit, — the mixture of two widows and one clergyman. Wonderful how much can be accomplished with small means. Also, most wonderful the centuries that seem to separate me from those July days when I lay innocently on the grass watching the clouds pass over the blue of the delphinium tops, before ever I had set eyes on Mrs. Barnes and Dolly, and while Uncle Rudolph, far away at home and not even beginning to think of a passport, was being normal in his Deanery.

  He has, I am sure, done what he promised and tried to be kinder to Mrs. Barnes, and I can only conclude he was not able to manage it, for I see no difference. He glowers and glowers, and she immovably knits. And in spite of the silence that reigns except when, for a desperate moment, I make an effort to be amusing, there is a curious feeling that we are really living in a state of muffled uproar, in a constant condition of barely suppressed brawl. I feel as though the least thing, the least touch, even somebody coughing, and the house will blow up. I catch myself walking carefully across the hall so as not to shake it, not to knock against the furniture. How secure, how peaceful, of what a great and splendid simplicity do those July days, those pre-guest days, seem now!

  October 12th.

  I went into Dolly’s bedroom last night, crept in on tiptoe because there is a door leading from it into Mrs. Barnes’s room, caught hold firmly of her wrist, and led her, without saying a word and taking infinite care to move quietly, into my bedroom. Then, having shut her in, I said, ‘What are you going to do about it?’

  She didn’t pretend not to understand. The candour of Dolly’s brow is an exact reflection of the candour of her mind.

  ‘About your uncle,’ she said, nodding. ‘I like him very much.’
>
  ‘Enough to marry him?’

  ‘Oh quite. I always like people enough to marry them.’ And she added, as though in explanation of this perhaps rather excessively amiable tendency, ‘Husbands are so kind.’

  ‘You ought to know,’ I conceded.

  ‘I do,’ said Dolly, with the sweetest reminiscent smile.

  ‘Uncle Rudolph is only waiting to get you alone to propose,’ I said.

  Dolly nodded. There was nothing I could tell her that she wasn’t already aware of.

  ‘As you appear to have noticed everything,’ I said, ‘I suppose you have also noticed that he is very much in love with you.’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Dolly placidly.

  ‘So much in love that he doesn’t seem even to remember that he’s a dignitary of the Church, and when he’s alone with me he behaves in a way I’m sure the Church wouldn’t like at all. Why, he almost swears.’

  ‘Isn’t it a good thing?’ said Dolly, approvingly.

  ‘Yes. But now what is to be done about Siegfried—’

  ‘Dear Siegfried,’ murmured Dolly.

  ‘And Juchs—’

  ‘Poor darling,’ murmured Dolly.

  ‘Yes, yes. But oughtn’t Uncle Rudolph to be told?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Dolly, her eyes a little surprised that I should want to know anything so obvious.

  ‘You told me it would kill Kitty if I knew about Juchs. It will kill her twice as much if Uncle Rudolph knows.’

  ‘Kitty won’t know anything about it. At least, not till it’s all over. My dear, when it comes to marrying I can’t be stuck all about with secrets.’

  ‘Do you mean to tell my uncle yourself?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Dolly, again with surprise in her eyes.

  ‘When?’

  ‘When he asks me to marry him. Till he does I don’t quite see what it has to do with him.’

  ‘And you’re not afraid — you don’t think your second marriage will be a great shock to him? He being a dean, and nourished on Tables of Affinity?’

  ‘I can’t help it if it is. He has got to know. If he loves me enough it won’t matter to him, and if he doesn’t love me enough it won’t matter to him either.’