Chapter V: Part 5

Having nothing else to offer Mrs. Barnes I offered her these, and suggested she should supply the questions.

She thought this way of dealing with riddles subversive and difficult. Dolly began to laugh. Mrs. Barnes, filled with the invigorating air, actually laughed too. It was the first time I have heard her laugh. I listened with awe. Evidently she laughs very rarely, for Dolly looked so extraordinarily pleased; evidently her doing it made to-day memorable, for Dolly's face, turned to her sister in a delighted surprise, had the expression on it that a mother's has when her offspring suddenly behaves in a way unhoped for and gratifying.

So there we stood, gesticulating gaily on the slippery slope.

This is a strange place. Its effects are incalculable. I suppose it is because it is five thousand feet up, and has so great a proportion of sunshine.

_September 6th._

There were letters this morning from England that wiped out all the gaiety of yesterday; letters that _reminded_ me. It was as if the cold mist had come back again, and blotted out the light after I had hoped it had gone for good. It was as if a weight had dropped down again on my heart, suffocating it, making it difficult to breathe, after I had hoped it was lifted off for ever. I feel sick. Sick with the return of the familiar pain, sick with fear that I am going to fall back hopelessly into it. I wonder if I am. Oh, I had such _hope_ that I was better! Shall I ever get quite well again? Won't it at best, after every effort, every perseverance in struggle, be just a more or less skilful mending, a more or less successful putting together of broken bits? I thought I had been growing whole. I thought I wouldn't any longer wince. And now these letters....

Ridiculous, hateful and ridiculous, to be so little master of one's own body that one has to look on helplessly at one's hands shaking.

I want to forget. I don't want to be reminded. It is my one chance of safety, my one hope of escape. To forget--forget till I have got my soul safe back again, really my own again, no longer a half destroyed thing. I call it my soul. I don't know what it is. I am very miserable.

It is details that I find so difficult to bear. As long as in my mind everything is one great, unhappy blur, there is a chance of quietness, of gradual creeping back to peace. But details remind me too acutely, flash back old anguish too sharply focussed. I oughtn't to have opened the letters till I was by myself. But it pleased me so much to get them. I love getting letters. They were in the handwriting of friends. How could I guess, when I saw them on the breakfast-table, that they would innocently be so full of hurt? And when I had read them, and I picked up my cup and tried to look as if nothing had happened and I were drinking coffee like anybody else, my silly hand shook so much that Dolly noticed it.

Our eyes met.

I couldn't get that wretched cup back on to its saucer again without spilling the coffee. If that is how I still behave, what has been the good of being here? What has the time been but wasted? What has the cure been but a failure?

I have come up to my room. I can't stay downstairs. It would be unbearable this morning to sit and be read to. But I must try to think of an excuse, quickly. Mrs. Barnes may be up any minute to ask--oh, I am hunted!

It is a comfort to write this. To write does make one in some strange way less lonely. Yet--having to go and look at oneself in the glass for companionship,--isn't that to have reached the very bottom level of loneliness?

_Evening._

The direct result of those letters has been to bring Dolly and me at last together.

She came down to the kitchen-garden after me, where I went this morning when I had succeeded in straightening myself out a little. On the way I told Mrs. Barnes, with as tranquil a face as I could manage, that I had arrangements to discuss with Antoine, and so, I was afraid, would for once miss the reading.

Antoine I knew was working in the kitchen-garden, a plot of ground hidden from the house at the foot of a steep descent, and I went to him and asked to be allowed to help. I said I would do anything,--dig, weed, collect slugs, anything at all, but he must let me work. Work with my hands out of doors was the only thing I felt I could bear to-day. It wasn't the first time, I reflected, that peace has been found among cabbages.

Antoine demurred, of course, but did at last consent to let me pick red currants. That was an easy task, and useful as well, for it would save Lisette the assistant's time, who would otherwise presently have to pick them. So I chose the bushes nearest to where he was digging, because I wanted to be near some one who neither talked nor noticed, some one alive, some one kind and good who wouldn't look at me, and I began to pick these strange belated fruits, finished and forgotten two months ago in the valley.

Then I saw Dolly coming down the steps cut in the turf. She was holding up her long black skirt. She had nothing on her head, and the sun shone in her eyes and made her screw them up as she stood still for a moment on the bottom step searching for me. I saw all this, though I was stooping over the bushes.

Then she came and stood beside me.

'You oughtn't to be here,' I said, going on picking and not looking at her.

'I know,' said Dolly.

'Then hadn't you better go back?'

'Yes. But I'm not going to.'

I picked in silence.

'You've been crying,' was what she said next.

'No,' I said.

'Perhaps not with your eyes, but you have with your heart.'

At this I felt very much like Mrs. Barnes; very much like what Mrs. Barnes must have felt when I tried to get her to be frank.

'Do you know what your sister said to me the other day?' I asked, busily picking. 'She said she has a great opinion of discretion.'

'Yes,' said Dolly. 'But I haven't.'

'And I haven't either,' I was forced to admit.

'Well then,' said Dolly.

I straightened myself, and we looked at each other. Her eyes have a kind of sweet radiance. Siegfried must have been pleased when he saw her coming down the sheet into his arms.

'You mustn't tell me anything you don't quite want to,' said Dolly, her sweet eyes smiling, 'but I couldn't see you looking so unhappy and not come and--well, stroke you.'

'There isn't anything to tell,' I said, comforted by the mere idea of being stroked.

'Yes there is.'

'Not really. It's only that once--oh well, what's the good? I don't want to think of it--I want to forget.'

Dolly nodded. 'Yes,' she said. 'Yes.'

'You see I came here to get cured by forgetting, and I thought I was cured. And this morning I found I wasn't, and it has--and it has disappointed me.'

'You musn't cry, you know,' said Dolly gently. 'Not in the middle of picking red currants. There's the man--'

She glanced at Antoine, digging.

I snuffled away my tears without the betrayal of a pocket handkerchief, and managed to smile at her.

'What idiots we go on being,' I said ruefully.

'Oh--idiots!'

Dolly made a gesture as of including the whole world.

'Does one ever grow up?' I asked.

'I don't know. I haven't.'

'But do you think one ever learns to bear pain without wanting to run crying bitterly to one's mother?'

'I think it's difficult. It seems to take more time,' she added smiling, 'than I've yet had, and I'm forty. You know I'm forty?'

'Yes. That is, I've been told so, but it hasn't been proved.'

'Oh, I never could _prove_ anything,' said Dolly.

Then she put on an air of determination that would have alarmed Mrs. Barnes, and said, 'There are several other things that I am that you don't know, and as I'm here alone with you at last I may as well tell you what they are. In fact I'm not going away from these currant bushes till I _have_ told you.'

'Then,' I said, 'hadn't you better help me with the currants while you tell?' And I lifted the basket across and put it on the ground between us.

Already I felt better. Comforted, cheered by Dolly's mere presence and the sweet understanding that seems to shine out from her.

She turned up her sleeves and plunged her arms into the currant bushes. Luckily currants don't have thorns, for if it had been a gooseberry bush she would have plunged her bare arms in just the same.

'You have asked us to stay on,' she began, 'and it isn't fair that you shouldn't know exactly what you are in for.'

'If you're going to tell, me how your name is spelt,' I said, 'I've guessed that already. It is Juchs.'

'Oh, you're clever!' exclaimed Dolly unexpectedly.

'Well, if that's clever,' I said modestly, 'I don't know what you would say to _some_ of the things I think of.'

Dolly laughed. Then she looked serious again, and tugged at the currants in a way that wasn't very good for the bush.

'Yes. His name was Juchs,' she said. 'Kitty always did pronounce it Jewks. It wasn't the war. It wasn't camouflage. She thought it was the way. So did the other relations in England. That is when they pronounced it at all, which I should think wasn't ever.'

'You mean they called him Siegfried,' I said.

Dolly stopped short in her picking to look at me in surprise. 'Siegfried?' she repeated, her arrested hands full of currants.

'That's another of the things I've guessed,' I said proudly. 'By sheer intelligently putting two and two together.'

'He wasn't Siegfried,' said Dolly.

'Not Siegfried?'

It was my turn to stop picking and look surprised.

'And in your sleep--? And so affectionately--?' I said.

'Siegfried wasn't Juchs, he was Bretterstangel,' said Dolly. 'Did I say his name that day in my sleep? Dear Siegfried.' And her eyes, even while they rested on mine became softly reminiscent.

'But Dolly--if Siegfried wasn't your husband, ought you to have--well, do you think it was wise to be dreaming of him?'

'But he was my husband.'

I stared.

'But you said your husband was Juchs,' I said.

'So he was,' said Dolly.

'He was? Then why--I'm fearfully slow, I know, but do tell me--if Juchs was your husband why wasn't he called Siegfried?'

'Because Siegfried's name was Bretterstangel. I _began_ with Siegfried.'

There was a silence. We stood looking at each other, our hands full of currants.

Then I said, 'Oh.' And after a moment I said, 'I see.' And after another moment I said, 'You _began_ with Siegfried.'

I was greatly taken aback. The guesses which had been arranged so neatly in my mind were swept into confusion.

'What you've got to realise,' said Dolly, evidently with an effort, 'is that I kept on marrying Germans. I ought to have left off at Siegfried. I wish now I had. But one gets into a habit--'

'But,' I interrupted, my mouth I think rather open, 'you kept on--?'

'Yes,' said Dolly, holding herself very straight and defiantly, 'I did keep on, and that's what I want you to be quite clear about before we settle down to stay here indefinitely. Kitty can't stay if I won't. I do put my foot down sometimes, and I would about this. Poor darling--she feels desperately what I've done, and I try to help her to keep it quiet with ordinary people as much as I can--oh, I'm always letting little bits out! But I can't, I won't, not tell a friend who so wonderfully invites us--'

'_You're_ not going to begin being grateful?' I interrupted quickly.

'You've no idea,' Dolly answered irrelevantly, her eyes wide with wonder at her past self, 'how difficult it is not to marry Germans once you've begun.'

'But--how many?' I got out.

'Oh, only two. It wasn't their number so much. It was their quality.'

'What--Junkers?'

'Junkers? Would you mind more if they had been? Do you mind very much anyhow?'

'I don't mind anything. I don't mind your being technically German a scrap. All I think is that it was a little--well, perhaps a little excessive to marry another German when you had done it once already. But then I'm always rather on the side of frugality. I do definitely prefer the few instead of the many and the little instead of the much.'

'In husbands as well?'

'Well yes--I think so.'

Dolly sighed.

'I wish I had been like that,' she said. 'It would have saved poor Kitty so much.'

She dropped the currants she held in her hands slowly bunch by bunch into the basket.

'But I don't see,' I said, 'what difference it could make to Kitty. I mean, once you had started having German husbands at all, what did it matter one more or less? And wasn't the second one d--I mean, hadn't he left off being alive when the war began? So I don't see what difference it could make to Kitty.'

'But that's just what you've got to realise,' said Dolly, letting the last bunch of currants drop out of her hand into the basket.

She looked at me, and I became aware that she was slowly turning red. A very delicate flush was slowly spreading over her face, so delicate that for a moment I didn't see what it was that was making her look more and more guilty, more and more like a child who has got to confess--but an honourable, good child, determined that it _will_ confess.

'You know,' she said, 'that I've lived in Germany for years and years.'

'Yes,' I said. 'I've guessed that.'

'And it's different from England.'

'Yes,' I said. 'So I understand.'

'The way they see things. Their laws.'

'Yes,' I said.

Dolly was finding it difficult to say what she had to say. I thought it might help her if I didn't look at her, so I once more began to pick currants. She mechanically followed my example.

'Kitty,' she said, as we both stooped busily over the same bush, 'thinks what I did too dreadful. So did all our English relations. It's because you may think so too that I've got to tell you. Then you can decide whether you really want me here or not.'

'Dear Dolly,' I murmured, 'don't please make my blood run cold--'

'Ah, but it's forbidden in the Prayer Book.'

'What is?'

'What I did.'

'_What_ did you do, Dolly?' I asked, now thoroughly uneasy; had her recklessness gone so far as to lead her to tamper with the Commandments?

Dolly tore off currants and leaves in handfuls and flung them together into the basket. 'I married my uncle,' she said.

'What?' I said, really astonished.

'Karl--that was my second husband--was Siegfried's--that was my first husband's--uncle. He was Siegfried's mother's brother--my first mother-in-law's brother. My second mother-in-law was my first husband's grandmother. In Germany you can. In Germany you do. But it's forbidden in the English Prayer Book. It's put in the Table of Kindred and Affinity that you mustn't. It's number nine of the right-hand column--Husband's Mother's Brother. And Kitty well, you can guess what Kitty has felt about it. If it had been my own uncle, my own mother's brother, she couldn't have been more horrified and heartbroken. I didn't realise. I didn't think of the effect it might have on them at home. I just did it. They didn't know till I had done it. I always think it saves bother to marry first and tell afterwards. I had been so many years in Germany. It seemed quite natural. I simply stayed on in the family. It was really habit.'

She threw some currants into the basket, then faced me. 'There,' she said, looking me straight in the eyes, 'I've told you, and if you think me impossible I'll go.'

'But--' I began.

Her face was definitely flushed now, and her eyes very bright.

'Oh, I'd be sorry, sorry,' she said impetuously, 'if this ended _us_!'

'Us?'

'You and me. But I couldn't stay here and not tell you, could I. Just because you may hate it so I had to tell you. You've got a dean in your family. The Prayer Book is in your blood. And if you do hate it I shall understand perfectly, and I'll go away and take Kitty and you need never see or hear of me again, so you musn't mind saying--'

'Oh do wait a minute!' I cried. 'I don't hate it. I don't mind. I'd only hate it and mind if it was I who had to marry a German uncle. I can't imagine why anybody should ever want to marry uncles anyhow, but if they do, and they're not blood-uncles, and it's the custom of the country, why not? You'll stay here, Dolly. I won't let you go. I don't care if you've married fifty German uncles. I've loved you from the moment I saw you on the top of the wall in your funny petticoat. Why, you don't suppose,' I finished, suddenly magnificently British, 'that I'm going to let any mere _German_ come between you and me?'

Whereupon we kissed each other,--not once, but several times; fell, indeed, upon each other's necks. And Antoine, coming to fetch the red currants for Lisette who had been making signs to him from the steps for some time past, stood waiting quietly till we should have done.

When he thought we had done he stepped forward and said, '_Pardon, mesdames_'--and stooping down deftly extracted the basket from between us.

As he did so his eye rested an instant on the stripped and broken branches of the currant bush.

He wasn't surprised.

_September 7th._

I couldn't finish about yesterday last night. When I had got as far as Antoine and the basket I looked at the little clock on my writing-table and saw to my horror that it was nearly twelve. So I fled into bed; for what would Mrs. Barnes have said if she had seen me burning the electric light and doing what she calls trying my eyes at such an hour? It doesn't matter that they are my eyes and my light: Mrs. Barnes has become, by virtue of her troubles, the secret standard of my behaviour. She is like the eye of God to me now,--in every place. And my desire to please her and make her happy has increased a hundredfold since Dolly and I have at last, in spite of her precautions, become real friends.

We decided before we left the kitchen-garden yesterday that this was the important thing: to keep Mrs. Barnes from any hurt that we can avoid. She has had so many. She will have so many more. I understand now Dolly's deep sense of all her poor Kitty has given up and endured for her sake, and I understand the shackles these sacrifices have put on Dolly. It is a terrible burden to be very much loved. If Dolly were of a less naturally serene temperament she would go under beneath the weight, she would be, after five years of it, a colourless, meek thing.

We agreed that Mrs. Barnes musn't know that I know about Dolly's marriages. Dolly said roundly that it would kill her. Mrs. Barnes regards her misguided sister as having committed a crime. It is forbidden in the Prayer Book. She brushes aside the possible Prayer Books of other countries. Therefore the word German shall never I hope again escape me while she is here, nor will I talk of husbands, and perhaps it will be as well to avoid mentioning uncles. Dear me, how very watchful I shall have to be. For the first time in his life the Dean has become unmentionable.

I am writing this before breakfast. I haven't seen Dolly alone again since the kitchen-garden. I don't know how she contrived to appease Mrs. Barnes and explain her long absence, but that she did contrive it was evident from the harmonious picture I beheld when, half an hour later, I too went back to the house. They were sitting together in the sun just outside the front door knitting. Mrs. Barnes's face was quite contented. Dolly looked specially radiant. I believe she is made up entirely of love and laughter--dangerous, endearing ingredients! We just looked at each other as I came out of the house. It is the most comforting, the warmest thing, this unexpected finding of a completely understanding friend.

_September 10th._

Once you have achieved complete understanding with anybody it isn't necessary, I know, to talk much. I have been told this by the wise. They have said mere knowledge that the understanding is there is enough. They have said that perfect understanding needs no expression, that the perfect intercourse is without words. That may be; but I want to talk. Not excessively, but sometimes. Speech does add grace and satisfaction to friendship. It may not be necessary, but it is very agreeable.

As far as I can see I am never, except by the rarest chance, going to get an opportunity of talking to Dolly alone. And there are so many things I want to ask her. Were her experiences all pleasant? Or is it her gay, indomitable spirit that has left her, after them, so entirely unmarked? Anyhow the last five years can't possibly have been pleasant, and yet they've not left the shadow of a stain on her serenity. I feel that she would think very sanely about anything her bright mind touched. There is something disinfecting about Dolly. I believe she would disinfect me of the last dregs of morbidness I still may have lurking inside me.

She and Mrs. Barnes are utterly poor. When the war began Dolly was in Germany, she told me that morning in the kitchen-garden, and had been a widow nearly a year. Not Siegfried's widow: Juchs's. I find her widowhoods confusing.

'Didn't you ever have a child, Dolly?' I asked.

'No,' she said.

'Then how is it you twitched the handkerchief off your sister's sleeping face that first day and said Peep bo to her so professionally?'

'I used to do that to Siegfried. We were both quite young to begin with, and played silly games.'

'I see,' I said. 'Go on.'

Juchs had left her some money; just enough to live on. Siegfried hadn't ever had any, except what he earned as a clerk in a bank, but Juchs had had some. She hadn't married Juchs for any reason, I gathered, except to please him. It did please him very much, she said, and I can quite imagine it. Siegfried too had been pleased in his day. 'I seem to have a gift for pleasing Germans,' she remarked, smiling. 'They were both very kind to me. I ended by being very fond of them both. I believe I'd be fond of anyone who was kind. There's a good deal of the dog about me.'

Directly the war began she packed up and came to Switzerland; she didn't wish, under such circumstances, to risk pleasing any more Germans. Since her marriage to Juchs all her English relations except Kitty had cast her off, so that only a neutral country was open to her, and Kitty instantly gave up everybody and everything to come and be with her. At first her little income was sent to her by her German bank, but after the first few months it sent no more, and she became entirely dependent on Kitty. All that Kitty had was what she got from selling her house. The Germans, Dolly said, would send no money out of the country. Though the war was over she could get nothing out of them unless she went back. She would never go back. It would kill Kitty; and she too, she thought, would very likely die. Her career of pleasing Germans does seem to be definitely over.

'So you see,' she said smiling, 'how wonderful it is for us to have found _you_.'

'What I can't get over,' I said, 'is having found _you_.'

But I wish, having found her, I might sometimes talk to her.

_September 12th._

We live here in an atmosphere of _combats de générosité_. It is tremendous. Mrs. Barnes and I are always doing things we don't want to do because we suppose it is what is going to make the other one happy. The tyranny of unselfishness! I can hardly breathe.

_September 19th._

I think it isn't good for women to be shut up too long alone together without a man. They seem to fester. Even the noblest. Taking our intentions all round they really are quite noble. We do only want to develope in ideal directions, and remove what we think are the obstacles to this development in each other's paths; and yet we fester. Not Dolly. Nothing ever smudges her equable, clear wholesomeness; but there are moments when I feel as if Mrs. Barnes and I got much mixed up together in a sort of sticky mass. Faint struggles from time to time, brief efforts at extrication, show there is still a life in me that is not flawlessly benevolent, but I repent of them as soon as made because of the pain and surprise that instantly appear in Mrs. Barnes's tired, pathetic eyes, and hastily I engulf myself once more in goodness.

That's why I haven't written lately, not for a whole week. It is glutinous, the prevailing goodness. I have stuck. I have felt as though my mind were steeped in treacle. Then to-day I remembered my old age, and the old lady waiting at the end of the years who will want to be amused, so I've begun again. I have an idea that what will really most amuse that old lady, that wrinkled philosophical old thing, will be all the times when I was being uncomfortable. She will be so very comfortable herself, so done with everything, so entirely an impartial looker-on, that the rebellions and contortions and woes of the creature who used to be herself will only make her laugh. She will be blithe in her security. Besides, she will know the sequel, she will know what came next, and will see, I daresay, how vain the expense of trouble and emotions was. So that naturally she will laugh. 'You _silly_ little thing!' I can imagine her exclaiming, 'If only you had known how it all wasn't going to matter!' And she will laugh very heartily; for I am sure she will be a gay old lady.

But what we really want here now is an occasional breath of brutality,--the passage, infrequent and not too much prolonged, of a man. If he came to tea once in a way it would do. He would be a blast of fresh air. He would be like opening a window. We have minced about among solicitudes and delicacies so very long. I want to smell the rankness of a pipe, and see the cushions thrown anyhow. I want to see somebody who doesn't knit. I want to hear Mrs. Barnes being contradicted. Especially do I want to hear Mrs. Barnes being contradicted ... oh, I'm afraid I'm still not very good!

_September 20th._

The grapes are ripe down in the vineyards along the edge of the valley, and this morning I proposed that we should start off early and spend the day among them doing a grape-cure.

Mrs. Barnes liked the idea very much, and sandwiches were ordered, for we were not to come back till evening; then at the last moment she thought it would be too hot in the valley, and that her head, which has been aching lately, might get worse. The sandwiches were ready on the hall table. Dolly and I were ready too, boots on and sticks in hand. To our great surprise Mrs. Barnes, contemplating the sandwiches, said that as they had been cut they mustn't be wasted, and therefore we had better go without her.

We were astonished. We were like children being given a holiday. She kissed us affectionately when we said goodbye, as though, to mark her trust in us,--in Dolly that she wouldn't tell me the dreadful truth about herself, in me that I wouldn't encourage her in undesirable points of view. How safe we were, how deserving of trust, Mrs. Barnes naturally didn't know. Nothing that either of us could say could possibly upset the other.

'If Mrs. Barnes knew the worst, knew I knew everything, wouldn't she be happier?' I asked Dolly as we went briskly down the mountain. 'Wouldn't at least part of her daily anxiety be got rid of, her daily fear lest I _should_ get to know?'

'It would kill her,' said Dolly firmly.

'But surely--'

'You mustn't forget that she thinks what I did was a crime.'

'You mean the uncle.'

'Oh, she wouldn't very much mind your knowing about Siegfried. She would do her utmost to prevent it, because of her horror of Germans and of the horror she assumes you have of Germans. But once you did know she would be resigned. The other--' Dolly shook her head. 'It would kill her,' she said again.

We came to a green slope starred thick with autumn crocuses, and sat down to look at them. These delicate, lovely things have been appearing lately on the mountain, at first one by one and then in flocks,--pale cups of light, lilac on long white stalks that snap off at a touch. Like the almond trees in the suburban gardens round London that flower when the winds are cruellest, the autumn crocuses seem too frail to face the cold nights we are having now; yet it is just when conditions are growing unkind that they come out. There they are, all over the mountain fields, flowering in greater profusion the further the month moves towards winter.

This particular field of them was so beautiful that with one accord Dolly and I sat down to look. One doesn't pass such beauty by. I think we sat quite half an hour drinking in those crocuses, and their sunny plateau, and the way the tops of the pine trees on the slope below stood out against the blue emptiness of the valley. We were most content. The sun was so warm, the air of such an extraordinary fresh purity. Just to breathe was happiness. I think that in my life I have been most blest in this, that so often just to breathe has been happiness.

Dolly and I, now that we could talk as much as we wanted to, didn't after all talk much. Suddenly I felt incurious about her Germans. I didn't want them among the crocuses. The past, both hers and mine, seemed to matter very little, seemed a stuffy, indifferent thing, in that clear present. I don't suppose if we hadn't brought an empty basket with us on purpose to take back grapes to Mrs. Barnes that we would have gone on down to the vineyards at all, but rather have spent the day just where we were. The basket, however, had to be filled; it had to be brought back filled. It was to be the proof that we had done what we said we would. Kitty, said Dolly, would be fidgeted if we hadn't carried out the original plan, and might be afraid that, if we weren't eating grapes all day as arranged, we were probably using our idle mouths for saying things she wished left unsaid.

'Does poor Kitty _always_ fidget?' I asked.

'Always,' said Dolly.

'About every single thing that might happen?'

'Every single thing,' said Dolly. 'She spends her life now entirely in fear--and it's all because of me.'

'But really, while she is with me she could have a holiday from fear if we told her I knew about your uncle and had accepted it with calm.'

'It would kill her,' said Dolly once more, firmly.

We lunched in the vineyards, and our desert was grapes. We ate them for a long while with enthusiasm, and went on eating them through every degree of declining pleasure till we disliked them. For fifty centimes each the owner gave us permission to eat grapes till we died if we wished to. For another franc we were allowed to fill the basket for Mrs. Barnes. Only conscientiousness made us fill it full, for we couldn't believe anybody would really want to eat such things as grapes. Then we began to crawl up the mountain again, greatly burdened both inside and out.

It took us over three hours to get home. We carried the basket in turns, half an hour at a time; but what about those other, invisible, grapes, that came with us as well? I think people who have been doing a grape-cure should sit quiet for the rest of the day, or else walk only on the level. To have to take one's cure up five thousand feet with one is hard. Again we didn't talk; this time because we couldn't. All that we could do was to pant and to perspire.

It was a brilliant afternoon, and the way led up when the vineyards left off through stunted fir trees that gave no shade, along narrow paths strewn with dry fir needles,--the slipperiest things in the world to walk on. Through these hot, shadeless trees the sun beat on our bent and burdened figures. Whenever we stopped to rest and caught sight of each other's flushed wet faces we laughed.

'Kitty needn't have been afraid we'd _say_ much,' panted Dolly in one of these pauses, her eyes screwed up with laughter at my melted state.

I knew what I must be looking like by looking at her.

It was five o'clock by the time we reached the field with the crocuses, and we sank down on the grass where we had sat in the morning, speechless, dripping, overwhelmed by grapes. For a long while we said nothing. It was bliss to lie in the cool grass and not to have to carry anything. The sun, low in the sky, slanted almost level along the field, and shining right through the thin-petalled crocuses made of each a little star. I don't know anything more happy than to be where it is beautiful with some one who sees and loves it as much as you do yourself. We lay stretched out on the grass, quite silent, watching the splendour grow and grow till, having reached a supreme moment of radiance, it suddenly went out. The sun dropped behind the mountains along to the west, and out went the light; with a flick; in an instant. And the crocuses, left standing in their drab field, looked like so many blown-out candles.

Dolly sat up.

'There now,' she said. 'That's over. They look as blind and dim as a woman whose lover has left her. Have you ever,' she asked, turning her head to me still lying pillowed on Mrs. Barnes's grapes--the basket had a lid--'seen a woman whose lover has left her?'

'Of course I have. Everybody has been left by somebody.'

'I mean _just_ left.'

'Yes. I've seen that too.'

'They look exactly like that,' said Dolly, nodding towards the crocuses. 'Smitten colourless. Light gone, life gone, beauty gone,--dead things in a dead world. I don't,' she concluded, shaking her head slowly, 'hold with love.'

At this I sat up too, and began to tidy my hair and put my hat on again. 'It's cold,' I said, 'now that the sun is gone. Let us go home.'

Dolly didn't move.

'Do you?' she asked.

'Do I what?'

'Hold with love.'

'Yes,' I said.

'Whatever happens?'

'Yes,' I said.

'Whatever its end is?'

'Yes,' I said. 'And I won't even say yes _and_ no, as the cautious Charlotte Brontë did when she was asked if she liked London. I won't be cautious in love. I won't look at all the reasons for saying no. It's a glorious thing to have had. It's splendid to have believed all one did believe.'

'Even when there never was a shred of justification for the belief?' asked Dolly, watching me.

'Yes,' I said; and began passionately to pin my hat on, digging the pins into my head in my vehemence. 'Yes. The thing is to believe. Not go round first cautiously on tiptoe so as to be sure before believing and trusting that your precious belief and trust are going to be safe. Safe! There's no safety in love. You risk the whole of life. But the great thing _is_ to risk--to believe, and to risk everything for your belief. And if there wasn't anything there, if it was you all by yourself who imagined the beautiful kind things in the other one, the wonderful, generous, beautiful kind things, what does it matter? They weren't there, but _you_ for once were capable of imagining them. You _were_ up among the stars for a little, you _did_ touch heaven. And when you've had the tumble down again and you're scrunched all to pieces and are just a miserable heap of blood and brokenness, where's your grit that you should complain? Haven't you seen wonders up there past all telling, and had supreme joys? It's because you were up in heaven that your fall is so tremendous and hurts so. What you've got to do is not to be killed. You've got at all costs to stay alive, so that for the rest of your days you may go gratefully, giving thanks to God that once ... you see,' I finished suddenly, 'I'm a great believer in saying thank you.'

'Oh,' said Dolly, laying her hand on my knee and looking at me very kindly, 'I'm so glad!'

'Now what are you glad about, Dolly?' I asked, turning on her and giving my hat a pull straight. And I added, my chin in the air, 'Those dead women of yours in their dead world, indeed! Ashamed of themselves--that's what they ought to be.'

'You're cured,' said Dolly.

'Cured,' I echoed.

I stared at her severely. 'Oh--I see,' I said. 'You've been drawing me out.'

'Of course I have. I couldn't bear to think of you going on being unhappy--hankering--'

'Hankering?'

Dolly got up. 'Now let's go home,' she said. 'It's my turn to carry the basket. Yes, it's a horrid word. Nobody should ever hanker. I couldn't bear it if you did. I've been afraid that perhaps--'

'Hankering!'

I got up too and stood very straight.

'Give me those grapes,' said Dolly.

'Hankering!' I said again.

And the rest of the way home, along the cool path where the dusk was gathering among the bushes and the grass was damp now beneath our dusty shoes, we walked with heads held high--hankering indeed!--two women surely in perfect harmony with life and the calm evening, women of wisdom and intelligence, of a proper pride and self-respect, kind women, good women, pleasant, amiable women, contented women, pleased women; and at the last corner, the last one between us and Mrs. Barnes's eye on the terrace, Dolly stopped, put down the basket, and laying both her arms about my shoulders kissed me.

'Cured,' she said, kissing me on one side of my face. 'Safe,' she said, kissing me on the other.

And we laughed, both of us, confident and glad. And I went up to my room confident and glad, for if I felt cured and Dolly was sure I was cured, mustn't it be true?

Hankering indeed.

_September 21st._

But I'm not cured. For when I was alone in my room last night and the house was quiet with sleep, a great emptiness came upon me, and those fine defiant words of mine in the afternoon seemed poor things, poor dwindled things, like kaisers in their night-gowns. For hours I lay awake with only one longing: to creep back,--back into my shattered beliefs, even if it were the littlest corner of them. Surely there must be some corner of them still, with squeezing, habitable? I'm so small. I need hardly any room. I'd curl up. I'd fit myself in. And I wouldn't look at the ruin of the great splendid spaces I once thought I lived in, but be content with a few inches. Oh, it's cold, cold, cold, left outside of faith like this....

For hours I lay awake; and being ashamed of myself did no good, because love doesn't mind about being ashamed.

_Evening._

All day I've slunk about in silence, watching for a moment alone with Dolly. I want to tell her that it was only one side of me yesterday, and that there's another, and another--oh, so many others; that I meant every word I said, but there are other things, quite different, almost opposite things that I also mean; that it's true I'm cured, but only cured in places, and over the rest of me, the rest that is still sick, great salt waves of memories wash every now and then and bite and bite....

But Dolly, who seems more like an unruffled pool of clear water to-day than ever, hasn't left Mrs. Barnes's side; making up, I suppose, for being away from her all yesterday.

Towards tea-time I became aware that Mrs. Barnes was watching me with a worried face, the well-known worried, anxious face, and I guessed she was wondering if Dolly had been indiscreet on our picnic and told me things that had shocked me into silence. So I cast about in my mind for something to reassure her, and, as I thought fortunately, very soon remembered the grapes.

'I'm afraid I ate too many grapes yesterday,' I said, when next I caught her worried, questioning eye.

Her face cleared. I congratulated myself. But I didn't congratulate myself long; for Mrs. Barnes, all motherly solicitude, inquired if by any chance I had swallowed some of the stones; and desiring to reassure her to the utmost as to the reason of my thoughtfulness, I said that very likely I had; from the feel of things; from the kind of heaviness.... And she, before I could stop her, had darted into the kitchen--these lean women are terribly nimble--and before I could turn round or decide what to do next, for by this time I was suspicious, she was back again with Mrs. Antoine and all the dreadful paraphernalia of castor oil. And I had to drink it. And it seemed hard that because I had been so benevolently desirous to reassure Mrs. Barnes I should have to drink castor oil and be grateful to her as well.

'This is petty,' I thought, sombrely eyeing the bottle,--I alluded in my mind to Fate.

But as I had to drink the stuff I might as well do it gallantly. And so I did; tossing it off with an air, after raising the glass and wishing the onlookers health and happiness in what I tried to make a pleasant speech.

Mrs. Barnes, Mrs. Antoine and Dolly stood watching me spellbound. A shudder rippled over them as the last drops slid down.

Then I came up here.

_September 22nd._

Let me draw your attention, O ancient woman sitting at the end of my life, to the colour of the trees and bushes in this place you once lived in, in autumns that for you are now so far away. Do you remember how it was like flames, and the very air was golden? The hazel-bushes, do you remember them? Along the path that led down from the terrace to the village? How each separate one was like a heap of light? Do you remember how you spent to-day, the 22nd of September, 1919, lying on a rug in the sun close up under one of them, content to stare at the clear yellow leaves against the amazing sky? You ve forgotten, I daresay. You re only thinking of your next meal and being put to bed. But you did spend a day to-day worth remembering. You were very content. You were exactly balanced in the present, without a single oscillation towards either the past, a period you hadn't then learned to regard with the levity for which you are now so remarkable, or to the future, which you at that time, however much the attitude may amuse you now, thought of with doubt and often with fear. Mrs. Barnes let you go to-day, having an appreciation of the privileges due to the dosed, and you took a cushion and a rug--active, weren't you--and there you lay the whole blessed day, the sun warm on your body, enfolded in freshness, thinking of nothing but calm things. Rather like a baby you were; a baby on its back sucking its thumb and placidly contemplating the nursery ceiling. But the ceiling was the great sky, with, two eagles ever so far up curving in its depths, and when they sloped their wings the sun caught them and they flashed.

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

_September 23rd._

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

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

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

'Growlings?' I echoed.

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

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

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

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

Dolly said she did.

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

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

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

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

'Did you say sentiment?' asked Dolly.

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

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

'No. Sediment.'

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

_September 24th._

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

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

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

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

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

_September 25th._