Chapter V: Dolly's Journal

"I'M awfully excited to-day, because—NO, that is not the way to begin a journal. Margot advises me to start one, now I am eighteen. She has been advising it ever since my birthday, and this morning she gave me a charming little red book, with lock and key. So I suppose I really must do as she wishes."

"She says it will be a make-weight to my spirits when I am disposed to bubble over. Is there any harm in bubbling over? The world would be very dull if everybody's feelings were always to be kept hermetically sealed."

"No fear of mine being so, at all events. I'm not reserved, and I hate reserve, and I can't get on with reserved people. I like to say out just what I think. Of course there must always be some little inner reserves in everybody; at least I suppose so; but that is different from taking a pride in hiding what one feels, and in trying to seem unlike what one is."

"There's one good thing about a private journal! One can say exactly what one likes, and nobody's feelings are hurt. That is the only difficulty about always saying out what one thinks. Some people are so awfully thin-skinned, always taking offence. Of course the polite way of describing them is to say that they are 'sensitive'; but when I speak out what I think, I call them ill-tempered."

"I suppose the correct opening for a journal is a general statement about everything and everybody; a description of one's home and people and ways of life. But that would take a lot of time and patience. If I have the time, I haven't the patience."

"Still, something has to be written by way of introduction, though really I don't know why. If anybody ever reads what I write, it can only be one who knows all about everything already. And most likely my first entry will be my last."

"However—we live at Woodlands; not a big grand place, but the quaintest of old-fashioned houses in the quaintest of old-fashioned gardens. The house has wings and high gables and queer little windows. And the garden in summer has no horrid carpet-patterns or red triangles and blue squares, but is just one mass of trained sweetness—just Nature under restraint. That was what Edred said one day last spring."

"Craye is ten minutes off, down the hill, a funny old town in a hollow. Craye went to sleep a few hundred years ago, like the Kaiser Barbarossa; and unlike the Kaiser, it has never woke up since, not even once in a century. Yet Craye has a railway station, and actually it is not more by rail than an hour and a half from London. Only, as one always has to wait at least an hour at the Junction, the journey can't be done under two hours and a half."

"Now for the preliminary statement about our important selves."

"There is my father first; the dearest and kindest and best old father that ever lived. Not really old either, and so handsome and soldierly still. He can be sharp sometimes, but not to me. He spends lots of time in the clouds, and when he comes out of them, he does dearly love to spoil his Dolly. I am sure she loves to be spoilt."

"Then there is my mother. She is two years older than my father, which didn't perhaps show when they were young, but it does now. A woman of sixty-three is so much more elderly than a man of sixty-one. At least it is so in this house. Mother has silver-white hair, and she stoops, and is getting infirm—more than many of her age; while my father is still slim and upright and active. He has iron-grey hair and never an ache or a pain, and he makes nothing of a fifteen-miles' walk."

"I sometimes think my mother is almost more like a grandmother in the house; so gentle and invalidish, and able to do so little. Yet nothing would go straight without her; and she and he are like lovers still; except that he has a sort of reverent way of looking up to her. He always calls her 'Mother,' and she calls him 'My dear!' Never anything else."

"Next comes Isabel, our eldest. She is thirty, and looks like forty. She has managed everything for the last ten years, and she is a dear good creature,—only rather fussy about little things. She counts herself tremendously severe with me, though she never can say 'No' when I coax; but then she always gives in 'only this once.' She is full of sense, and can't understand a joke by any possibility.

"Then follows Margot, poor dear! Four years younger than Isabel, and eight years older than me. Margot has a weak spine, and lies down a good deal; still she hates to be called an invalid, and never will talk about herself and her symptoms. So people don't get tired of Margot's invalidism. I don't think I should describe her as the model invalid of story books; and yet she is not what Miss Baynes calls 'the fractious sufferer of real life.' Sometimes she has depressed moods, but when she is happy, she has the sweetest face in the world. And even when she is depressed, she never gets into a temper."

"Last of all there is me—Dolly—the household pet and plague. I am not like Issy or Margot. Issy is substantial and slow; and Margot is tall and slim; while I am small and bony, but not a scrap delicate, and everything that I do is always done in a hurry. I have a great lot of fair hair—golden hair some call it—but the trouble of my life is a snub nose,—a real undeniable little snub. Nothing can hide or cure that. Issy's is too long, with a droop at the end, worse even than mine; but Margot has the sweetest little love of a straight nose, neither long nor short. If only I had a nose like hers, I should be perfectly happy."

"Well, no—not perfectly, perhaps; because I should want to be tall and graceful also. It would be so nice to carry one's head higher than other people, and always to be gentle, and calm, and dignified. I should wish to be like Lady Geraldine—"

"'While as one who quells the lions, with a steady eye serenely
She, with level fronting eyelids, passed out stately from the room.'"

"That would be delicious! I suppose most people's eyelids are level, and face the front; but it sounds distinguished. Mine, of course, are level, only they are always on the move, and I am afraid I haven't 'steady eyes serenely' quelling other people."

"O me, what nonsense I am writing! Is that the good of a journal—to show one more of one's real self?"

"I have done at last with regular lessons, and a daily governess. After the holidays, I shall be supposed to read history and French, and to practise regularly. But my plans always come to grief."

"They say I ought to take Emmeline for my model—good dear Emmeline Claughton, who gets up at six and lives by clockwork, and does everything, and has time for everybody. Whereas I lie in bed till nearly eight, and have to scramble to be in time, and spend every day unlike the rest, and hate rules, and never have time for anything except fun and story books, skating in winter, and tennis in summer. So I don't seem likely to grow into a second Emmeline."

"Would Edred be pleased, if I did?"

"How stupid of me to write that! What did make me? I have a great mind to scratch out the sentence. Now I can never show my journal to anybody."

"After all, why should I show it? And what is the harm of speaking about Edred?"

"Perhaps the proper thing here is to make a statement about the Claughtons. They live at the Park and are very rich. There is only one daughter, Emmeline, and Emmeline has two brothers, Mervyn and Edred. Mervyn is the heir, and he does nothing particular, but comes and goes, and bothers people. Edred is a curate in London. I like him—oh, much the best of the two, and so I know does Emmie."

"Mr. Claughton is kind, only too pompous, and I am not very fond of Mrs. Claughton. She has such a way of setting everybody to rights. But very likely, she doesn't mean to be disagreeable."

"I'm most awfully excited about—"

* * * * * *

"I had to leave off in a hurry, because the lunch-bell rang. And now it doesn't seem worth while to go back to that half-written sentence, about being awfully excited! For it is all over, and I am so dreadfully disappointed."

"Edred was expected down yesterday for just two nights—all the time he could spare from his work this Christmas. And Emmeline had asked me to go to the skating on their pond this afternoon. I think it was to pass the time before three o'clock that I took to my journal."

"But at lunch my father said a change had come, and a thaw was setting in. And before we had done, a note arrived from Emmie, telling me that the ice was unsafe, and that Edred had to hurry back to town to-day. So this time I shall not even see him."

"It does seem sometimes as if life were all made up of disappointments."