In the Mountains Part 13

'But if we're cold--'

'We should indeed be poor creatures, Dolly and I, if the moment it left off being warm we were cold. Please do not think we don't appreciate your kindness in wishing to give us a fire, but Dolly and I would feel it very much if our being here were to make you begin fires so early.'

'But--'

'Keep the logs for later on. Let me beg you.'

So we didn't have a fire; and there we sat, Mrs. Barnes with the white shawl at last put to its proper use, and all of us trying not to shiver.

After breakfast, which was taken away bodily, table and all, s.n.a.t.c.hed from our midst by the Antoines, so that we were left sitting facing each other round empty s.p.a.ce with a curious sensation of sudden nakedness, I supposed that Merivale would be produced, so I got up and pushed a comfortable chair conveniently for Dolly, and turned on the light.

To my surprise I found Mrs. Barnes actually preferred to relinquish the reading aloud rather than use my electric light in the daytime. It would be an unpardonable extravagance, she said. Dolly could work at her knitting. Neither of them needed their eyes for knitting.

I was greatly touched. From the first she has shown a touching, and at the same time embarra.s.sing, concern not to cause me avoidable expense, but never yet such concern as this. I know what store she sets by the reading. Why, if we just sat there in the gloom we might begin to say things. I really was very much touched.

But indeed Mrs. Barnes is touching. It is because she is so touching in her desire not to give trouble, to make us happy, that one so continually does exactly what she wishes. I would do almost anything sooner than hurt Mrs. Barnes. Also I would do almost anything to calm her. And as for her adhesiveness to an unselfish determination, it is such that it is mere useless fatigue to try to separate her from it.

I have learned this gradually.

At first, most of my time at meals was spent in rea.s.suring her that things hadn't been got specially on her and Dolly's account, and as the only other account they could have been got on was mine, my a.s.surances had the effect of making me seem very greedy. I thought I lived frugally up here, but Mrs. Barnes must have lived so much more frugally that almost everything is suspected by her to be a luxury provided by my hospitality.

She was, for instance, so deeply persuaded that the apricots were got, as she says, specially, that at last to calm her I had to tell Mrs.

Antoine to buy no more. And we all liked apricots. And there was a perfect riot of them down in the valley. After that we had red currants because they, Mrs. Barnes knew, came out of the garden; but we didn't eat them because we didn't like them.

Then there was a jug of lemonade sent in every day for lunch that worried her. During this period her talk was entirely of lemons and sugar, of all the lemons and sugar that wouldn't be being used if she and Dolly were again, in order to calm her, and rather than that she should be made unhappy, I told Mrs. Antoine to send in only water.

Cakes disappeared from tea a week ago. Eggs have survived at breakfast, and so has honey, because Mrs. Barnes can hear the chickens and has seen the bees and knows they are not things got specially. She will eat potatoes and cabbages and anything else that the garden produces with serenity, but grows restive over meat; and a leg of mutton made her miserable yesterday, for nothing would make her believe that if I had been here alone it wouldn't have been a cutlet.

'Let there be no more legs of mutton,' I said to Mrs. Antoine afterwards. 'Let there instead be three cutlets.'

I'm afraid Mrs. Antoine is scandalised at the inhospitable rigours she supposes me to be applying to my guests. My order to Antoine this morning not to light the fire will have increased her growing suspicion that I am developing into a cheese-paring Madame. She must have expressed her fears to Antoine; for the other day, when I told her to leave the sugar and lemons out of the lemonade and send in only the water, she looked at him, and as I went away I heard her saying to him in a low voice--he no doubt having told her I usedn't to be like this, and she being unable to think of any other explanation--'_C'est la guerre_.'

About eleven, having done little good by my presence in the hall whose cheerlessness wrung from me a thoughtless exclamation that I wished I smoked a pipe, upon which Dolly instantly said, 'Wouldn't it be a comfort,' and Mrs. Barnes said, 'Dolly,' I went away to the kitchen, pretending I wanted to ask what there was for dinner but really so as to be for a few moments where there was a fire.

Mrs. Antoine watched me warming myself with respectful disapproval.

'_Madame devrait faire faire un peu de feu dans la halle_,' she said.

'_Ces dames auront bien froid_.'

'_Ces dames_ won't let me,' I tried to explain in the most pa.s.sionate French I could think of. '_Ces dames_ implore me not to have a fire.

_Ces dames_ reject a fire. _Ces dames_ defend themselves against a fire.

I perish because of the resolve of _ces dames_ not to have a fire.'

But Mrs. Antoine plainly didn't believe me. She thought, I could see, that I was practising a repulsive parsimony on defenceless guests. It was the sorrows of the war, she concluded, that had changed Madame's nature. This was the kindest, the only possible, explanation.

_Evening._

There was a knock at my door just then. I thought it must be Mrs.

Antoine come to ask me some domestic question, and said _Entrez,_ and it was Mrs. Barnes.

She has not before this penetrated into my bedroom. I hope I didn't look too much surprised. I think there could hardly have been a gap of more than a second between my surprise and my recovered hospitality.

'Oh--_do_ come in,' I said. 'How nice of you.'

Thus do the civilised clothe their real sensations in splendid robes of courtesy.

'Dolly and I haven't driven you away from the hall, I hope?' began Mrs.

Barnes in a worried voice.

'I only came up here for a minute,' I explained, 'and was coming down again directly.'

'Oh, that relieves me. I was afraid perhaps--'

'I wish you wouldn't so often be afraid you're driving me away,' I said pleasantly. 'Do I look driven?'

But Mrs. Barnes took no notice of my pleasantness. She had something on her mind. She looked like somebody who is reluctant and yet impelled.

'I think,' she said solemnly, 'that if you have a moment to spare it might be a good opportunity for a little talk. I would like to talk with you a little.'

And she stood regarding me, her eyes full of reluctant but unconquerable conscientiousness.

'Do,' I said, with polite enthusiasm. 'Do.'

This was the backwash, I thought, of Dolly's German outbreak the other day, and Siegfried was going at last to be explained to me.

'Won't you sit down in this chair?' I said, pushing a comfortable one forward, and then sitting down myself on the edge of the sofa.

'Thank you. What I wish to say is--'

She hesitated. I supposed her to be finding it difficult to proceed with Siegfried, and started off impulsively to her rescue.

'You know, I don't mind a bit about--' I began.

'What I wish to say is,' she went on again, before I had got out the fatal word, 'what I wish to point out to you--is that the weather has considerably cooled.'

This was so remote from Siegfried that I looked at her a moment in silence. Then I guessed what was coming, and tried to put it off.

'Ah,' I said--for I dreaded, the grateful things she would be sure to say about having been here so long--'you do want a fire in the hall after all, then.'

'No, no. We are quite warm enough, I a.s.sure you. A fire would distress us. What I wish to say is--' Again she hesitated, then went on more firmly, 'Well, I wish to say that the weather having broken and the great heat having come to an end, the reasons which made you extend your kind, your delightful hospitality to us, have come to an end also. I need hardly tell you that we never, never shall be able to express to you--'

'Oh, but you're not going to give me notice?' I interrupted, trying to be sprightly and to clamber over her rock-like persistence in grat.i.tude with the gaiety of a bright autumnal creeper. This was because I was nervous. I grow terribly sprightly when I am nervous.

But indeed I shrink from Mrs. Barnes's grat.i.tude. It abases me to the dust. It leaves me mourning in much the same way that Simon Lee's grat.i.tude left Wordsworth mourning. I can't bear it. What a world it is, I want to cry out,--what a miserable, shameful, battering, crushing world, when so dreadfully little makes people so dreadfully glad!

Then it suddenly struck me that the expression giving notice might not be taken by Mrs. Barnes, she being solemn, in the spirit in which it was offered by me, I being sprightly; and, desperately afraid of having possibly offended her, I seized on the first thing I could think of as most likely to soothe her, which was an extension, glowing and almost indefinite, of my invitation. 'Because, you know,' I said, swept along by this wish to prevent a wound, 'I won't accept the notice. I'm not going to let you go. That is, of course,' I added, 'if you and Dolly don't mind the quiet up here and the monotony. Won't you stay on here till I go away myself?'