Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  ‘Been there?’ repeated Wemyss, drawing her away for he wanted his coffee. ‘How can I remember? Ever since I’ve lived here, I should think. He died five years ago. He was a wonderful old man, nearly ninety. He used to stay here a lot.’

  Opposite this picture hung another, next to the door that led into the hall, — also a photograph enlarged to life-size. Lucy had noticed neither of these pictures when she came in, because the light from the windows was in her eyes. Now, turning to go out through the door led by Wemyss, she was faced by this one.

  It was Vera. She knew at once; and if she hadn’t she would have known the next minute, because he told her.

  ‘Vera,’ he said, in a matter-of-fact tone, as it were introducing them.

  ‘Vera,’ repeated Lucy under her breath; and she and Vera — for this photograph too followed one about with its eye — stared at each other.

  It must have been taken about twelve years earlier, judging from the clothes. She was standing, and in a day dress that yet had a train to it trailing on the carpet, and loose, floppy sleeves and a high collar. She looked very tall, and had long thin fingers. Her dark hair was drawn up from her ears and piled on the top of her head. Her face was thin and seemed to be chiefly eyes, — very big dark eyes that stared out of the absurd picture in a kind of astonishment, and her mouth had a little twist in it as though she were trying not to laugh.

  Lucy looked at her without moving. So this was Vera. Of course. She had known, though she had never constructed any image of her in her mind, had carefully avoided doing it, that she would be like that. Only older; the sort of Vera she must have been at forty when she died, — not attractive like that, not a young woman. To Lucy at twenty-two, forty seemed very old; at least, if you were a woman. In regard to men, since she had fallen in love with some one of forty-five who was certainly the youngest thing she had ever come across, she had rearranged her ideas of age, but she still thought forty very old for a woman. Vera had been thin and tall and dark in her idea of her, just as this Vera was thin and tall and dark; but thin bonily, tall stoopingly, and her dark hair was turning grey. In her idea of her, too, she was absent-minded and not very intelligent; indeed, she was rather troublesomely unintelligent, doing obstinate, foolish things, and at last doing that fatal, obstinate, foolish thing which so dreadfully ended her. This Vera was certainly intelligent. You couldn’t have eyes like that and be a fool. And the expression of her mouth, — what had she been trying not to laugh at that day? Did she know she was going to be enlarged and hang for years in the bleak dining-room facing her father-in-law, each of them eyeing the other from their walls, while three times a day the originals sat down beneath their own pictures at the long table and ate? Perhaps she laughed, thought Lucy, because else she might have cried; only that would have been silly, and she couldn’t have been silly, — not with those eyes, not with those straight, fine eyebrows. But would she, herself, presently be photographed too and enlarged and hung there? There was room next to Vera, room for just one more before the sideboard began. How very odd it would be if she were hung up next to Vera, and every day three times as she went out of the room was faced by Everard’s wives. And how quaint to watch one’s clothes as the years went by leaving off being pretty and growing more absurd. Really for such purposes one ought to be just wrapped round in a shroud. Fashion didn’t touch shrouds; they always stayed the same. Besides, how suitable, thought Lucy, gazing into her dead predecessor’s eyes; one would only be taking time by the forelock....

  ‘Come along.’ said Wemyss, drawing her away, ‘I want my coffee. Don’t you think it’s a good idea,’ he went on, as he led her down the hall to the library door, ‘to have life-sized photographs instead of those idiotic portraits that are never the least like people?’

  ‘Oh, a very good idea,’ said Lucy mechanically, bracing herself for the library. There was only one room in the house she dreaded going into more than the library, and that was the sitting-room on the top floor, — her sitting-room and Vera’s.

  ‘Next week we’ll go to a photographer’s in London and have my little girl done,’ said Wemyss, pushing open the library door, ‘and then I’ll have her exactly as God made her, without some artist idiot or other coming butting-in with his idea of her. God’s idea of her is good enough for me. They won’t have to enlarge much,’ he laughed, ‘to get you life-size, you midge. Vera was five foot ten. Now isn’t this a fine room? Look — there’s the river. Isn’t it jolly being so close to it? Come round here — don’t knock against my writing-table, now. Look — there’s only the towpath between the river and the garden. Lord, what a beastly day. It might just as easily have been a beautiful spring day and us having our coffee out on the terrace. Don’t you think this is a beautiful look-out, — so typically English with the beautiful green lawn and the bit of lush grass along the towpath, and the river. There’s no river like it in the world, is there, little Love. Say you think it’s the most beautiful river in the world’ — he hugged her close— ‘say you think it’s a hundred times better than that beastly French one we got so sick of with all those châteaux.’

  ‘Oh, a hundred times better,’ said Lucy.

  They were standing at the window, with his arm round her shoulder. There was just room for them between it and the writing-table. Outside was the flagged terrace, and then a very green lawn with worms and blackbirds on it and a flagged path down the middle leading to a little iron gate. There was no willow hedge along the river end of the square garden, so as not to interrupt the view, — only the iron railings and wire-netting. Terra-cotta vases, which later on would be a blaze of geraniums, Wemyss explained, stood at intervals on each side of the path. The river, swollen and brown, slid past Wemyss’s frontage very quickly that day, for there had been much rain. The clouds scudding across the sky before the wind were not in such a hurry but that every now and then they let loose a violent gust of ram, soaking the flags of the terrace again just as the wind had begun to dry them up. How could he stand there, she thought, holding her tight so that she couldn’t get away, making her look out at the very place on those flags not two yards off....

  But the next minute she thought how right he really was, how absolutely the only way this was to do the thing. Perfect simplicity was the one way to meet this situation successfully; and she herself was so far from simplicity that here she was shrinking, not able to bear to look, wanting only to hide her face, — oh, he was wonderful, and she was the most ridiculous of fools.

  She pressed very close to him, and put up her face to his, shutting her eyes, for so she shut out the desolating garden with its foreground of murderous flags.

  ‘What is it, little Love?’ asked Wemyss.

  ‘Kiss me,’ she said; and he laughed and kissed her, but hastily, because he wanted her to go on admiring the view.

  She still, however, held up her face. ‘Kiss my eyes,’ she whispered, keeping them shut. ‘They’re tired — —’

  He laughed again, but with a slight impatience, and kissed her eyes; and then, suddenly struck by her little blind face so close to his, the strong light from the big window showing all its delicate curves and delicious softnesses, his Lucy’s face, his own little wife’s, he kissed her really, as she loved him to kiss her, becoming absorbed only in his love.

  ‘Oh, I love you, love you — —’ murmured Lucy, clinging to him, making secret vows of sensibleness, of wholesomeness, of a determined, unfailing future simplicity.

  ‘Aren’t we happy,’ he said, pausing in his kisses to gaze down at what was now his face, for was it not much more his than hers? Of course it was his. She never saw it, except when she specially went to look, but he saw it all the time; she only had duties in regard to it, but he was on the higher plane of only having joys. She washed it, but he kissed it. And he kissed it when he liked and as much as ever he liked. ‘Isn’t it wonderful being married,’ he said, gazing down at this delightful thing that was his very own for ever.

  ‘Oh — wonderful!’
murmured Lucy, opening her eyes and gazing into his.

  Her face broke into a charming smile. ‘You have the dearest eyes,’ she said, putting up her finger and gently tracing his eyebrows with it.

  Wemyss’s eyes, full at that moment of love and pride, were certainly dear eyes, but a noise at the other end of the room made Lucy jump so in his arms, gave her apparently such a fright, that when he turned his head to see who it was daring to interrupt them, daring to startle his little girl like that, and beheld the parlourmaid, his eyes weren’t dear at all but very angry.

  The parlourmaid had come in with the coffee; and seeing the two interlaced figures against the light of the big window had pulled up short, uncertain what to do. This pulling up had jerked a spoon off its saucer onto the floor with a loud rattle because of the floor not having a carpet on it and being of polished oak, and it was this noise that made Lucy jump so excessively that her jump actually made Wemyss jump too.

  In the parlourmaid’s untrained phraseology there had been a good deal of billing and cooing during luncheon, and even in the hall before luncheon there were examples of it, but what she found going on in the library was enough to make anybody stop dead and upset things, — it was such, she said afterwards in the kitchen, that if she didn’t know for a fact that they were really married she wouldn’t have believed it. Married people in the parlourmaid’s experience didn’t behave like that. What affection there was was exhibited before, and not after, marriage. And she went on to describe the way in which Wemyss — thus briefly and irreverently did they talk of their master in the kitchen — had flown at her for having come into the library. ‘After telling me to,’ she said. ‘After saying, “We’ll ‘ave coffee in the library.”’ And they all agreed, as they had often before agreed, that if it weren’t that he was in London half the time they wouldn’t stay in the place five minutes.

  Meanwhile Wemyss and Lucy were sitting side by side in two enormous chairs facing the unlit library fire drinking their coffee. The fire was only lit in the evenings, explained Wemyss, after the 1st of April; the weather ought to be warm enough by then to do without fires in the daytime, and if it wasn’t it was its own look-out.

  ‘Why did you jump so?’ he asked. ‘You gave me such a start. I couldn’t think what was the matter.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lucy, faintly flushing. ‘Perhaps’ — she smiled at him over the arm of the enormous chair in which she almost totally disappeared— ‘because the maid caught us.’

  ‘Caught us?’

  ‘Being so particularly affectionate.’

  ‘I like that,’ said Wemyss. ‘Fancy feeling guilty because you’re being affectionate to your own husband.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ laughed Lucy, ‘don’t forget I haven’t had him long.’

  ‘You’re such a complicated little thing. I shall have to take you seriously in hand and teach you to be natural. I can’t have you having all sorts of finicking ideas about not doing this and not doing the other before servants. Servants don’t matter. I never consider them.’

  ‘I wish you had considered the poor parlourmaid,’ said Lucy, seeing that he was in an unoffended frame of mind. ‘Why did you give her such a dreadful scolding?’

  ‘Why? Because she made you jump so. You couldn’t have jumped more if you had thought it was a ghost. I won’t have your flesh being made to creep.’

  ‘But it crept much worse when I heard the things you said to her.’

  ‘Nonsense. These people have to be kept in order. What did the woman mean by coming in like that?’

  ‘Why, you told her to bring us coffee.’

  ‘But I didn’t tell her to make an infernal noise by dropping spoons all over the place.’

  ‘That was because she got just as great a fright when she saw us as I did when I heard her.’

  ‘I don’t care what she got. Her business is not to drop things. That’s what I pay her for. But look here — don’t you go thinking such a lot of tangled-up things and arguing. Do, for goodness sake, try and be simple.’

  ‘I feel very simple,’ said Lucy, smiling and putting out her hand to him, for his face was clouding. ‘Do you know, Everard, I believe what’s the matter with me is that I’m too simple.’

  Wemyss roared, and forgot how near he was getting to being hurt. ‘You simple! You’re the most complicated — —’

  ‘No I’m not. I’ve got the untutored mind and uncontrolled emotions of a savage. That’s really why I jumped.’

  ‘Lord,’ laughed Wemyss, ‘listen to her how she talks. Anybody might think she was clever, saying such big long words, if they didn’t know she was just her Everard’s own little wife. Come here, my little savage — come and sit on your husband’s knee and tell him all about it.’

  He held out his arms, and Lucy got up and went into them and he rocked her and said, ‘There, there — was it a little untutored savage then — —’

  But she didn’t tell him all about it, first because by now she knew that to tell him all about anything was asking for trouble, and second because he didn’t really want to know. Everard, she was beginning to realise with much surprise, preferred not to know. He was not merely incurious as to other people’s ideas and opinions, he definitely preferred to be unconscious of them.

  This was a great contrast to the restless curiosity and interest of her father and his friends, to their insatiable hunger for discussion, for argument; and it much surprised Lucy. Discussion was the very salt of life for them, — a tireless exploration of each other’s ideas, a clashing of them together, and out of that clashing the creation of fresh ones. To Everard, Lucy was beginning to perceive, discussion merely meant contradiction, and he disliked contradiction, he disliked even difference of opinion. ‘There’s only one way of looking at a thing, and that’s the right way,’ as he said, ‘so what’s the good of such a lot of talk?’

  The right way was his way; and though he seemed by his direct, unswerving methods to succeed in living mentally in a great calm, and though after the fevers of her father’s set this was to her immensely restful, was it really a good thing? Didn’t it cut one off from growth? Didn’t it shut one in an isolation? Wasn’t it, frankly, rather like death? Besides, she had doubts as to whether it were true that there was only one way of looking at a thing, and couldn’t quite believe that his way was invariably the right way. But what did it matter after all, thought Lucy, snuggled up on his knee with one arm round his neck, compared to the great, glorious fact of their love? That at least was indisputable and splendid. As to the rest, truth would go on being truth whether Everard saw it or not; and if she were not going to be able to talk over things with him she could anyhow kiss him, and how sweet that was, thought Lucy. They understood each other perfectly when they kissed. What, indeed, when such sweet means of communion existed, was the good of a lot of talk?

  ‘I believe you’re asleep’ said Wemyss, looking down at the face on his breast.

  ‘Sound,’ said Lucy, smiling, her eyes shut.

  ‘My baby.’

  ‘My Everard.’

  XVIII

  But this only lasted as long as his pipe lasted. When that was finished he put her off his knee, and said he was now ready to gratify her impatience and show her everything; they would go over the house first, and then the garden and outbuildings.

  No woman was ever less impatient than Lucy. However, she pulled her hat straight and tried to seem all readiness and expectancy. She wished the wind wouldn’t howl so. What an extraordinary dreary place the library was. Well, any place would be dreary at half-past two o’clock on such an afternoon, without a fire and with the rain beating against the window, and that dreadful terrace just outside.

  Wemyss stooped to knock out the ashes of his pipe on the bars of the empty grate, and Lucy carefully kept her head turned away from the window and the terrace towards the other end of the room. The other end was filled with bookshelves from floor to ceiling, and the books, in neat rows and uniform editions, were packed so
tightly in the shelves that no one but an unusually determined reader would have the energy to wrench one out. Reading was evidently not encouraged, for not only were the books shut in behind glass doors, but the doors were kept locked and the key hung on Wemyss’s watch-chain. Lucy discovered this when Wemyss, putting his pipe in his pocket, took her by the arm and walked her down the room to admire the shelves. One of the volumes caught her eye, and she tried to open the glass door to take it out and look at it. ‘Why,’ she said surprised, ‘it’s locked.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Wemyss.

  ‘Why but then nobody can get at them.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘But — —’

  ‘People are so untrustworthy about books. I took pains to arrange mine myself, and they’re all in first-class-bindings and I don’t want them taken out and left lying anywhere by Tom, Dick, and Harry. If any one wants to read they can come and ask me. Then I know exactly what is taken, and can see that it is put back.’ And he held up the key on his watch-chain.

  ‘But doesn’t that rather discourage people?’ asked Lucy, who was accustomed to the most careless familiarity in intercourse with books, to books loose everywhere, books overflowing out of their shelves, books in every room, instantly accessible books, friendly books, books used to being read aloud, with their hospitable pages falling open at a touch.

  ‘All the better,’ said Wemyss. ‘I don’t want anybody to read my books.’

  Lucy laughed, though she was dismayed inside. ‘Oh Everard—’ she said, ‘not even me?’

  ‘You? You’re different. You’re my own little girl. Whenever you want to, all you’ve got to do is to come and say, “Everard, your Lucy wants to read,” and I’ll unlock the bookcase.’

  ‘But — I shall be afraid I may be disturbing you.’

  ‘People who love each other can’t ever disturb each other.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Lucy.