In the Mountains Part 11

I can't explain this. It couldn't only have been the air, invigorating and inspiriting though it is, because my present guests are still exactly the same age as the first day. That is, Mrs. Barnes is. Dolly is of no age--she never was and never will be forty; but Mrs. Barnes is just as firmly fifty as she was a fortnight ago, and it only used to take those other guests a week to shed every one of their years except the first twenty.

Is it this static, rock-like quality in Mrs. Barnes that makes her remain so unchangeably a guest, that makes her unable to develope into a friend? Why must I, because she insists on remaining a guest, be kept so firmly in my proper place as hostess? I want to be friends. I feel as full of friendliness as a br.i.m.m.i.n.g cup. Why am I not let spill some of it? I should love to be friends with Dolly, and I would like very much to be friends with Mrs. Barnes. Not that I think she and I would ever be intimate in the way I am sure Dolly and I would be after ten minutes together alone, but we might develope a mutually indulgent affection. I would respect her prejudices, and she would forgive me that I have so few, and perhaps find it interesting to help me to increase them.

But the anxious care with which Mrs. Barnes studies to be her idea of a perfect guest forces me to a corresponding anxious care to be her idea of a perfect hostess. I find it wearing. There is no easy friendliness for us, no careless talk, no happy go-as-you-please and naturalness. And ought a guest to be so constantly grateful? Her grat.i.tude is almost a reproach. It makes me ashamed of myself; as if I were a plutocrat, a profiteer, a bloated possessor of more than my share, a bestower of favours--of all odious things to be! Now I perceive that I never have had guests before, but only friends. For the first time I am really entertaining; or rather, owing to the something in Mrs. Barnes that induces in me a strange submissiveness, a strange acceptance of her ordering of our days, I am for the first time, not only in my own house, but in any house that I can remember where I have stayed, being entertained.

What is it about Mrs. Barnes that makes Dolly and me sit so quiet and good? I needn't ask: I know. It is because she is single-minded, unselfish, genuinely and deeply anxious for everybody's happiness and welfare, and it is impossible to hurt such goodness. Accordingly we are bound hand and foot to her wishes, exactly as if she were a tyrant.

Dolly of course must be bound by a thousand reasons for grat.i.tude.

Hasn't Mrs. Barnes given up everything for her? Hasn't she given up home, and livelihood, and country and friends to come and be with her?

It is she who magnanimously bears the chief burden of Dolly's marriage.

Without having had any of the joys of Siegfried--I can't think Dolly would mutter a name in her sleep that wasn't her husband's--she has spent these years of war cheerfully accepting the results of him, devoting herself to the forlorn and stranded German widow, spending her life, and what substance she has, in keeping her company in the dreary pensions of a neutral country, unable either to take her home to England or to leave her where she is by herself.

Such love and self-sacrifice is a very binding thing. If these conjectures of mine are right, Dolly is indeed bound to Mrs. Barnes, and not to do everything she wished would be impossible. Naturally she wears those petticoats, and those long, respectable black clothes: they are Mrs. Barnes's idea of how a widow should be dressed. Naturally she goes for excursions in the mountains with an umbrella: it is to Mrs.

Barnes both more prudent and more seemly than a stick. In the smallest details of her life Dolly's grat.i.tude must penetrate and be expressed.

Yes; I think I understand her situation. The good do bind one very heavily in chains.

To an infinitely less degree Mrs. Barnes's goodness has put chains on me too. I have to walk very carefully and delicately among her feelings. I could never forgive myself if I were to hurt anyone kind, and if the kind person is cast in an entirely different mould from oneself, has different ideas, different tastes, a different or no sense of fun, why then G.o.d help one,--one is ruled by a rod of iron.

Just the procession each morning after breakfast to the chairs and Merivale is the measure of Dolly's and my subjection. First goes Dolly with the book, then comes Mrs. Barnes with her knitting, and then comes me, casting my eyes about for a plausible excuse for deliverance and finding none that wouldn't hurt. If I lag, Mrs. Barnes looks uneasily at me with her, 'Am I driving you off your own terrace?' look; and once when I lingered indoors on the pretext of housekeeping she came after me, anxiety on her face, and begged me to allow her to help me, for it is she and Dolly, she explained, who of course cause the extra housekeeping, and it distressed her to think that owing to my goodness in permitting them to be here I should be deprived of the leisure I would otherwise be enjoying.

'In your lovely Swiss home,' she said, her face puckered with earnestness. 'On your summer holiday. After travelling all this distance for the purpose.'

'Dear Mrs. Barnes--' I murmured, ashamed; and a.s.sured her it was only an order I had to give, and that I was coming out immediately to the reading aloud.

_August 31st._

This morning I made a great effort to be simple.

Of course I will do everything in my power to make Mrs. Barnes happy,--I'll sit, walk, be read to, keep away from Dolly, arrange life for the little time she is here in the way that gives her mind most peace; but why mayn't I at the same time be natural? It is so natural to me to be natural. I feel so uncomfortable, I get such a choked sensation of not enough air, if I can't say what I want to say. Abstinence from naturalness is easily managed if it isn't to last long; every gracefulness is possible for a little while. But shut up for weeks together in the close companionship of two other people in an isolated house on a mountain one must, sooner or later, be natural or one will, sooner or later, die.

So this morning I went down to breakfast determined to be it. More than usually deep sleep had made me wake up with a feeling of more than usual enterprise. I dressed quickly, strengthening my determination by many good arguments, and then stood at the window waiting for the bell to ring.

At the first tinkle of the bell I hurry downstairs, because if I am a minute late, as I have been once or twice, I find my egg wrapped up in my table napkin, the coffee and hot milk swathed in a white woollen shawl Mrs. Barnes carries about with her, a plate over the b.u.t.ter in case there should be dust, a plate over the honey in case there should be flies, and Mrs. Barnes and Dolly, carefully detached from the least appearance of reproach or waiting, at the other end of the terrace being tactfully interested in the view.

This has made me be very punctual. The bell tinkles, and I appear. I don't appear before it tinkles, because of the peculiar preciousness of all the moments I can legitimately spend in my bedroom; but, if I were to, I would find Mrs. Barnes and Dolly already there.

I don't know when they go down, but they are always there; and always I am greeted with the politest solicitude from Mrs. Barnes as to how I slept. This of course draws forth a corresponding solicitude from me as to how Mrs. Barnes slept; and the first part of breakfast is spent in answers to these inquiries, and in the eulogies to which Mrs. Barnes then proceeds of the bed, and the pure air, that make the satisfactoriness of her answers possible.

From this she goes on to tell me how grateful she and Dolly are for my goodness. She tells me this every morning. It is like a kind of daily morning prayer. At first I was overcome, and, not knowing how to ward off such repeated blows of thankfulness, stumbled about awkwardly among protests and a.s.surances. Now I receive them in silence, copying the example of the heavenly authorities; but, more visibly embarra.s.sed than they, I sheepishly smile.

After the praises of my goodness come those of the goodness of the coffee and the b.u.t.ter, though this isn't any real relief to me, because their goodness is so much tangled up in mine. I am the Author of the coffee and the b.u.t.ter; without me they wouldn't be there at all.

Dolly, while this is going on, says nothing but just eats her breakfast.

I think she might help me out a little, seeing that it happens every morning and that she must have noticed my store of deprecations is exhausted.

This morning, having made up my mind to be natural, I asked her straight out why she didn't talk.

She was in the middle of her egg, and Mrs. Barnes was in the middle of praising the great goodness of the eggs, and therefore, inextricably, of my great goodness, so that there was no real knowing where the eggs left off and I began; and taking the opportunity offered by a pause of coffee-drinking on Mrs. Barnes's part, I said to Dolly, 'Why do you not talk at breakfast?'

'Talk?' repeated Dolly, looking up at me with a smile.

'Yes. Say things. How are we ever to be friends if we don't say things?

Don't you want to be friends, Dolly?'

'Of course,' said Dolly, smiling.

Mrs. Barnes put her cup down hastily. 'But are we not--' she began, as I knew she would.

'_Real_ friends,' I interrupted. 'Why not,' I said, 'let us have a holiday from Merivale to-day, and just sit together and talk. Say things,' I went on, still determined to be natural, yet already a little nervous. '_Real_ things.'

'But has the reading--is there any other book you would pref--do you not care about Merivale?' asked Mrs. Barnes, in deep concern.

'Oh yes,' I a.s.sured her, leaving off being natural for a moment in order to be polite, 'I like him very much indeed. I only thought--I do think--it would be pleasant for once to have a change. Pleasant just to sit and talk. Sit in the shade and--oh well, _say_ things.'

'Yes,' said Dolly. 'I'd love to.'

'We might tell each other stories, like the people in the _Earthly Paradise_. But real stories. Out of our lives.'

'Yes,' said Dolly again. 'Yes. I'd love to.'

'We shall be very glad, I am sure,' said Mrs. Barnes politely, 'to listen to any stories you may like to tell us.'

'Ah, but you must tell some too--we must play fair.'

'I'd love to,' said Dolly again, her dimple flickering.

'Surely we--in any case Dolly and I--are too old to play at anything,'

said Mrs. Barnes with dignity.

'Not really. You'll like it once you've begun. And anyhow I can't play by myself, can I,' I said, still trying to be gay and simple. 'You wouldn't want me to be lonely, would you.'

But I was faltering. Mrs. Barnes's eye was on me. Impossible to go on being gay and simple beneath that eye.

I faltered more and more. 'Sometimes I think,' I said, almost timidly, 'that we're wasting time.'

'Oh no, do you really?' exclaimed Mrs. Barnes anxiously. 'Do you not consider Merivale--' (here if I had been a man I would have said d.a.m.n Merivale and felt better)--'very instructive? Surely to read a good history can never be wasting time? And he is not heavy. Surely you do not find him heavy? His information is always imparted picturesquely, remarkably so. And though one may be too old for games one is fortunately never too old for instruction.'

'I don't _feel_ too old for games,' said Dolly.

'Feeling has nothing to do with reality,' said Mrs. Barnes sternly, turning on her.

'I only thought,' I said, 'that to-day we might talk together instead of reading. Just for once--just for a change. If you don't like the idea of telling stories out of our lives let us just talk. Tell each other what we think of things--of the big things like--well, like love and death for instance. Things,' I rea.s.sured her, 'that don't really touch us at this moment.'

'I do not care to talk about love and death,' said Mrs. Barnes frostily.

'But why?'

'They are most unsettling.'