In the Mountains Part 21

_September 30th._

The weather is better again, and there has been a pause in our strivings. Mrs. Barnes and I have drifted, tired both of us, I resting in that refuge of the weak, the putting off of making up my mind, back into talking only of the situation and the view. If Mrs. Barnes were either less good or more intelligent! But the combination of non-intelligence with goodness is una.s.sailable. You can't get through.

Nothing gets through. You give in. You are flattened out. You become a slave. And your case is indeed hopeless if the non-intelligent and good, are at the same time the victims, n.o.bly enduring, of undeserved misfortune.

_Evening._

A really remarkable thing happened to-day: I've had a prayer answered. I shall never dare pray again. I prayed for a man, any man, to come and leaven us, and I've got him.

Let me set it down in order.

This afternoon on our walk, soon after we had left the house and were struggling along against gusts of wind and whirling leaves in the direction, as it happened, of the carriage road up from the valley, Dolly said, 'Who is that funny little man coming towards us?'

And I looked, and said after a moment in which my heart stood still--for what had _he_ come for?--'That funny little man is my uncle.'

There he was, the authentic uncle: gaiters, ap.r.o.n, shovel hat. He was holding on his hat, and the rude wind, thwarted in its desire to frolic with it, frisked instead about his ap.r.o.n, twitching it up, bellying it out; so that his remaining hand had all it could do to smooth the ap.r.o.n down again decorously, and he was obliged to carry his umbrella pressed tightly against his side under his arm.

'Not your uncle the Dean?' asked Mrs. Barnes in a voice of awe, hastily arranging her toque; for a whiff of the Church, any whiff, even one so faint as a curate, is as the breath of life to her.

'Yes,' I said, amazed and helpless. 'My Uncle Rudolph.'

'Why, he might be a German,' said Dolly, 'with a name like that.'

'Oh, but don't say so to him!' I cried. 'He has a perfect _horror_ of Germans--'

And it was out before I remembered, before I could stop it. Good heavens, I thought; good heavens.

I looked sideways at Mrs. Barnes. She was, I am afraid, very red. So I plunged in again, eager to rea.s.sure her. 'That is to say,' I said, 'he used to have during the war. But of course now that the war is over it would be mere silliness--n.o.body minds now--n.o.body _ought_ to mind now--'

My voice, however, trailed out into silence, for I knew, and Mrs. Barnes knew, that people do mind.

By this time we were within hail of my uncle, and with that joy one instinctively a.s.sumes on such occasions I waved my stick in exultant circles at him and called out, 'How very delightful of you, Uncle Rudolph!' And I advanced to greet him, the others tactfully dropping behind, alone.

There on the mountain side, with the rude wind whisking his clothes irreverently about, we kissed; and in my uncle's kiss I instantly perceived something of the quality of Mrs. Barnes's speeches the day I smoked the twelve cigarettes,--he was forgiving me.

'I have come to escort you home to England,' he said, his face spread over with the spirit of allowing byegones to be byegones; and in that spirit he let go of his ap.r.o.n in order rea.s.suringly to pat my shoulder.

Immediately the ap.r.o.n bellied. His hand had abruptly to leave my shoulder so as to clutch it down again. 'You are with ladies?' he said a little distractedly, holding on to this turbulent portion of his clothing.

'Yes, Uncle Rudolph,' I replied modestly. 'I hope you didn't expect to find me with gentlemen?'

'I expected to find you, dear child, as I have always found you,--ready to admit and retrace. Generously ready to admit and retrace.'

'Sweet of you,' I murmured. 'But you should have let me know you were coming. I'd have had things killed for you. Fatted things.'

'It is not I,' he said, in as gentle a voice as he could manage, the wind being what it was, 'who am the returning prodigal. Indeed I wish for your sake that I were. My shoulders could bear the burden better than those little ones of yours.'

This talk was ominous, so I said, 'I must introduce you to Mrs. Barnes and her sister Mrs. Jewks. Let me present,' I said ceremoniously, turning to them who were now fortunately near enough, 'my Uncle Rudolph to you, of whom you have often heard me speak.'

'Indeed we have,' said Mrs. Barnes, with as extreme a cordiality as awe permitted.

My uncle, obviously relieved to find his niece not eccentrically alone but flanked by figures so respectable, securely, as it were, embedded in widows, was very gracious. Mrs. Barnes received his pleasant speeches with delighted reverence; and as we went back to the house, for the first thing to do with arrivals from England is to give them a bath, he and she fell naturally into each other's company along the narrow track, and Dolly and I followed behind.

We looked at each other, simultaneously perceiving the advantages of four rather than of three. Behind Mrs. Barnes's absorbed and obsequious back we looked at each other with visions in our eyes of unsupervised talks opening before us.

'They have their uses, you see,' I said in a low voice,--not that I need have lowered it in that wind.

'Deans have,' agreed Dolly, nodding.

And my desire to laugh,--discreetly, under my breath, ready to pull my face sober and be gazing at the clouds the minute our relations should turn round, was strangled by the chill conviction that my uncle's coming means painful things for me.

He is going to talk to me; talk about what I am trying so hard not to think of, what I really am succeeding in not thinking of; and he is going to approach the desolating subject in, as he will say and perhaps even persuade himself to believe, a Christian spirit, but in what really is a spirit of sheer worldliness. He has well-founded hopes of soon going to be a bishop. I am his niece. The womenkind of bishops should be inconspicuous, should see to it that comment cannot touch them.

Therefore he is going to try to get me to deliver myself up to a life of impossible wretchedness again, only that the outside of it may look in order. The outside of the house,--of the house of a bishop's niece,--at all costs keep it neat, keep it looking like all the others in the street; so shall n.o.body know what is going on inside, and the neighbours won't talk about one's uncle.

If I were no relation but just a mere ordinary stranger-soul in difficulties, he, this very same man, would be full of understanding, would find himself unable, indeed, the facts being what they are, to be anything but most earnestly concerned to help me keep clear of all temptations to do what he calls retrace. And at the same time he would be concerned also to strengthen me in that mood which is I am sure the right one, and does very often recur, of being entirely without resentment and so glad to have the remembrance at least of the beautiful things I believed in. But I am his niece. He is about to become a bishop. Naturally he has to be careful not to be too much like Christ.

Accordingly I followed uneasily in his footsteps towards the house, dreading what was going to happen next. And nothing has happened next.

Not yet, anyhow. I expect to-morrow....

We spent a most bland evening. I'm as sleepy and as much satiated by ecclesiastical good things as though I had been the whole day in church.

My uncle, washed, shaven, and restored by tea, laid himself out to entertain. He was the decorous life of the party. He let himself go to that tempered exuberance with which good men of his calling like to prove that they really are not so very much different from other people after all. Round the hall fire we sat after tea, and again after supper, Dolly and I facing each other at the corners, my uncle and Mrs. Barnes in the middle, and the room gently echoed with seemly and strictly wholesome mirth. 'How enjoyable,' my uncle seemed to say, looking at us at the end of each of his good stories, gathering in the harvest of our appreciation, 'how enjoyable is the indulgence of legitimate fun. Why need one ever indulge in illegitimacy?'

And indeed his stories were so very good that every one of them, before they reached the point of bringing forth their joke, must have been to church and got married.

Dolly sat knitting, the light shining on her infantile fair hair, her eyes downcast in a dove-like meekness. Punctually her dimple flickered out at the right moment in each anecdote. She appeared to know by instinct where to smile; and several times I was only aware that the moment had come by happening to notice her dimple.

As for Mrs. Barnes, for the first time since I have known her, her face was cloudless. My uncle, embarked on anecdote, did not mention the war.

We did not once get on to Germans. Mrs. Barnes could give herself up to real enjoyment. She beamed. She was suffused with reverential delight.

And her whole body, the very way she sat in her chair, showed an absorption, an eagerness not to miss a crumb of my uncle's talk, that would have been very gratifying to him if he were not used to just this.

It is strange how widows cling to clergymen. Ever since I can remember, like the afflicted Margaret's apprehensions in Wordsworth's poem, they have come to Uncle Rudolph in crowds. My aunt used to raise her eyebrows and ask me if I could at all tell her what they saw in him.

When we bade each other goodnight there was something in Mrs. Barnes's manner to me that showed me the presence of a man was already doing its work. She was aerated. Fresh, air had got into her and was circulating freely. At my bedroom door she embraced me with warm and simple heartiness, without the usual painful search of my face to see if by any chance there was anything she had left undone in her duty of being unselfish. My uncle's arrival has got her thoughts off me for a bit. I knew that what we wanted was a man. Not that a dean is quite my idea of a man, but then on the other hand neither is he quite my idea of a woman, and his arrival does put an end for the moment to Mrs. Barnes's and my dreadful _combats de generosite_. He infuses fresh blood into our anaemic little circle. Different blood, perhaps I should rather say; the blood of deans not being, I think, ever very fresh.

'Good night, Uncle Rudolph,' I said, getting up at ten o'clock and holding up my face to him. 'We have to thank you for a delightful evening.'

'Most delightful,' echoed Mrs. Barnes enthusiastically, getting up too and rolling up her knitting.

My uncle was gratified. He felt he had been at his best, and that his best had been appreciated.

'Good night, dear child,' he said, kissing my offered cheek. 'May the blessed angels watch about your bed.'

'Thank you, Uncle Rudolph,' I said, bowing my head beneath this benediction.

Mrs. Barnes looked on at the little domestic scene with reverential sympathy. Then her turn came.

'_Good_ night, Mrs. Barnes,' said my uncle most graciously, shaking hands and doing what my dancing mistress used to call bending from the waist.

And to Dolly, '_Good_ night, Miss--'