Chapter III: Part 3

Presently I put down the book, and wandered out on to the terrace and gazed awhile at the view. That, too, seemed wrapped in afternoon slumber. After a bit I wandered round the house to Mou-Mou. He, too, was asleep. Then I came back to the front door and glanced in at my guests. Still no change. Then I fetched some cigarettes, not moving this time quite so carefully, and going out again sat on the low terrace-wall at a point from which I could see straight on to the sofa and notice any movement that might take place.

I never smoke except when bored, and as I am never bored I never smoke. But this afternoon it was just that unmanageable sort of moment come upon me, that kind of situation I don't know how to deal with, which does bore me. I sat on the wall and smoked three cigarettes, and the peace on the sofa remained complete. What ought one to do? What did one do, faced by obstinately sleeping guests? Impossible deliberately to wake them up. Yet I was sure--they had now been asleep nearly an hour--that when they did wake up, polite as they were, they would be upset by discovering that they had slept. Besides, the afternoon was getting on. They had a long way to go. If only Mou-Mou would wake up and bark.... But there wasn't a sound. The hot afternoon brooded over the mountains in breathless silence.

Again I went round to the back of the house, and pausing behind the last corner so as to make what I did next more alarming, suddenly jumped out at Mou Mou.

The horribly intelligent dog didn't bother to open more than an eye, and that one he immediately shut again.

Disgusted with him, I returned to my seat on the wall and smoked another cigarette. The picture on the sofa was the same: perfect peace. Oh well, poor things--but I did want to talk. And after all it was my birthday.

When I had finished the cigarette I thought a moment, my face in my hands. A person of tact--ah, but I have no tact; it has been my undoing on the cardinal occasions of life that I have none. Well, but suppose I _were_ a person of tact--what would I do? Instantly the answer flashed into my brain: Knock, by accident, against a table.

So I did. I got up quickly and crossed into the hall and knocked against a table, at first with gentleness, and then as there was no result with greater vigour.

My elder guest behind the handkerchief continued to draw deep regular breaths, but to my joy the younger one stirred and opened her eyes.

'Oh, I do _hope_ I didn't wake you?' I exclaimed, taking an eager step towards the sofa.

She looked at me vaguely, and fell asleep again.

I went back on to the terrace and lit another cigarette. That was five. I haven't smoked so much before in one day in my life ever. I felt quite fast. And on my birthday too. By the time I had finished it there was a look about the shadows on the grass that suggested tea. Even if it were a little early the noise of the teacups might help to wake up my guests, and I felt that a call to tea would be a delicate and hospitable way of doing it.

I didn't go through the hall on tiptoe this time, but walked naturally; and I opened the door into the kitchen rather noisily. Then I looked round at the sofa to see the effect. There wasn't any.

Presently tea was ready, out on the table where we had lunched. At least six times I had been backwards and forwards through the hall, the last twice carrying things that rattled and that I encouraged to rattle. But on the sofa the strangers slept peacefully on.

There was nothing for it now but to touch them. Short of that, I didn't think that anything would wake them. But I don't like touching guests; I mean, in between whiles. I have never done it. Especially not when they weren't looking. And still more especially not when they were complete strangers.

Therefore I approached the sofa with reluctance, and stood uncertain in front of it. Poor things, they really were most completely asleep. It seemed a pity to interrupt. Well, but they had had a nice rest; they had slept soundly now for two hours. And the tea would be cold if I didn't wake them up, and besides, how were they going to get home if they didn't start soon? Still, I don't like touching guests. Especially strange guests....

Manifestly, however, there was nothing else to be done, so I bent over the younger one--the other one was too awe-inspiring with her handkerchief over her face--and gingerly put my hand on her shoulder.

Nothing happened.

I put it on again, with a slightly increased emphasis.

She didn't open her eyes, but to my embarrassment laid her cheek on it affectionately and murmured something that sounded astonishingly like Siegfried.

I know about Siegfried, because of going to the opera. He was a German. He still is, in the form of Siegfried Wagner, and I daresay of others; and once somebody told me that when Germans wished to indulge their disrespect for the Kaiser freely--he was not at that time yet an ex-Kaiser---without being run in for _lèse majesté_, they loudly and openly abused him under the name of Siegfried Meyer, whose initials, S.M., also represent _Seine Majestät_; by which simple methods everybody was able to be pleased and nobody was able to be hurt. So that when my sleeping guest murmured Siegfried, I couldn't but conclude she was dreaming of a German; and when at the same time she laid her cheek on my hand, I was forced to realise that she was dreaming of him affectionately. Which astonished me.

Imbued with patriotism--the accumulated patriotism of weeks spent out of England--I felt that this English lady should instantly be roused from a dream that did her no credit. She herself, I felt sure, would be the first to deplore such a dream. So I drew my hand away from beneath her cheek--even by mistake I didn't like it to be thought the hand of somebody called Siegfried and, stooping down, said quite loud and distinctly in her ear, 'Won't you come to tea?'

This, at last, did wake her. She sat up with a start, and looked at me for a moment in surprise.

'Oh,' she said, confused, 'have I been asleep?'

'I'm very glad you have,' I said, smiling at her, for she was already again smiling at me. 'Your climb this morning was enough to kill you.'

'Oh, but,' she murmured, getting up quickly and straightening her hair, 'how dreadful to come to your house and go to sleep--'

And she turned to the elder one, and again astonished me by, with one swift movement, twitching the handkerchief off her face and saying exactly as one says when playing the face-and-handkerchief game with one's baby, 'Peep bo.' Then she turned back to me and smiled and said nothing more, for I suppose she knew the elder one, roused thus competently, would now do all the talking; as indeed she did, being as I feared greatly upset and horrified when she found she had not only been asleep but been it for two hours.

We had tea; and all the while, while the elder one talked of the trouble she was afraid she had given, and the shame she felt that they should have slept, and their gratitude for what she called my prolonged and patient hospitality, I was wondering about the other. Whenever she caught my pensive and inquiring eye she smiled at me. She had very sweet eyes, grey ones, gentle and intelligent, and when she smiled an agreeable dimple appeared. Bringing my Paley's _Evidences_ and Sherlock Holmes' side to bear on her, I reasoned that my younger guest was, or had been, a mother,--this because of the practised way she had twitched the handkerchief off and said Peep bo; that she was either a widow, or hadn't seen her husband for some time,--this because of the real affection with which, in her sleep she had laid her cheek on my hand; and that she liked music and often went to the opera.

After tea the elder got up stiffly--she had walked much too far already, and was clearly unfit to go all that long way more--and said, if I would direct them, they must now set out for the valley.

The younger one put on her toque obediently at this, and helped the elder one to pin hers on straight. It was now five o'clock, and if they didn't once lose their way they would be at their hotel by half-past seven; in time, said the elder, for the end of _table-d'hôte,_ a meal much interfered with by the very numerous flies. But if they did go wrong at any point it would be much later, probably dark.

I asked them to stay.

To stay? The elder, engaged in buttoning her tight kid gloves, said it was most kind of me, but they couldn't possibly stay any longer. It was far too late already, owing to their so unfortunately having gone to sleep--

'I mean stay the night,' I said; and explained that it would be doing me a kindness, and because of that they must please overlook anything in such an invitation that might appear unconventional, for certainly if they did set out I should lie awake all night thinking of them lost somewhere among the precipices, or perhaps fallen over one, and how much better to go down comfortably in daylight, and I could lend them everything they wanted, including a great many new toothbrushes I found here,--in short, I not only invited, I pressed; growing more eager by the sheer gathering momentum of my speech.

All day, while the elder talked and I listened, I had secretly felt uneasy. Here was I, one woman in a house arranged for family gatherings, while they for want of rooms were forced to swelter in the valley. Gradually, as I listened, my uneasiness increased. Presently I began to feel guilty. And at last, as I watched them sleeping in such exhaustion on the sofa, I felt at the bottom of my heart somehow responsible. But I don't know, of course, that it is wise to invite strangers to stay with one.

They accepted gratefully. The moment the elder understood what it was that my eager words were pressing on her, she drew the pins out of her toque and laid it on the chair again; and so did the other one, smiling at me.

When the Antoines came home I went out to meet them. By that time my guests were shut up in their bedrooms with new toothbrushes. They had gone up very early, both of them so stiff that they could hardly walk. Till they did go up, what moments I had been able to spare from my hasty preparations for their comfort had been filled entirely, as earlier in the day, by the elder one's gratitude; there had still been no chance of real talk.

'_J'ai des visites_,' I said to the Antoines, going out to meet them when, through the silence of the evening, I heard their steps coming up the path.

Antoine wasn't surprised. He just said, '_Ca sera comme autrefois_,' and began to shut the shutters.

But I am. I can't go to bed, I'm so much surprised. I've been sitting up here scribbling when I ought to have been in bed long ago. Who would have thought that the day that began so emptily would end with two of my rooms full,--each containing a widow? For they are widows, they told me: widows who have lost their husbands by peaceful methods, nothing to do with the war. Their names are Mrs. Barnes and Mrs. Jewks,--at least that is what the younger one's sounded like; I don't know if I have spelt it right. They come from Dulwich. I think the elder one had a slight misgiving at the last, and seemed to remember what was due to the Lord Mayor, when she found herself going to bed in a strange house belonging to somebody of whom she knew nothing; for she remarked a little doubtfully, and with rather a defensive eye fixed on me, that the war had broken down many barriers, and that people did things now that they wouldn't have dreamed of doing five years ago.

The other one didn't say nothing, but actually kissed me. I hope she wasn't again mistaking me for Siegfried.

_August 15th_

My guests have gone again, but only to fetch their things and pay their hotel bill, and then they are coming back to stay with me till it is a little cooler. They are coming back to-morrow, not to-day. They are entangled in some arrangement with their pension that makes it difficult for them to leave at once.

Mrs. Barnes appeared at breakfast with any misgivings she may have had last night gone, for when I suggested they should spend this hot weather up here she immediately accepted. I hadn't slept for thinking of them. How could I possibly not ask them to stay, seeing their discomfort and my roominess? Towards morning it was finally clear to me that it wasn't possible: I would ask them. Though, remembering the look in Mrs. Barnes's eye the last thing last night, I couldn't be sure she would accept. She might want to find out about me first, after the cautious and hampering way of women,--oh, I wish women wouldn't always be so cautious, but simply get on with their friendships! She might first want assurances that there was some good reason for my being here all by myself. Alas, there isn't a good reason; there is only a bad one. But, fortunately, to be alone is generally regarded as respectable, in spite of what Seneca says a philosopher said to a young man he saw walking by himself: 'Have a care,' said he, 'of lewd company.'

However, I don't suppose Mrs. Barnes knew about Seneca. Anyhow she didn't hesitate. She accepted at once, and said that under these circumstances it was certainly due to me to tell me a little about themselves.

At this I got my dean ready to meet the Lord Mayor, but after all I was told nothing more than that my guests are sisters; for at this point, very soon arrived at, the younger one, Mrs. Jewks, who had slipped away on our getting up from breakfast, reappeared with the toques and gloves, and said she thought they had better start before it got any hotter.

So they went, and the long day here has been most beautiful--so peaceful, so quiet, with the delicate mountains like opals against the afternoon sky, and the shadows lengthening along the valley.

I don't feel to-day as I did yesterday, that I want to talk. To-day I am content with things exactly as they are: the sun, the silence, the caresses of the funny little white kitten with the smudge of black round its left eye that makes it look as though it must be somebody's wife, and the pleasant knowledge that my new friends are coming back again.

I think that knowledge makes to-day more precious. It is the last day for some time, for at least a week judging from the look of the blazing sky, of what I see now that they are ending have been wonderful days. Up the ladder of these days I have climbed slowly away from the blackness at the bottom. It has been like finding some steps under water just as one was drowning, and crawling up them to air and light. But now that I have got at least most of myself back to air and light, and feel hopeful of not slipping down again, it is surely time to arise, shake myself, and begin to do something active and fruitful. And behold, just as I realise this, just as I realise that I am, so to speak, ripe for fruit-bearing, there appear on the scene Mrs. Barnes and Mrs. Jewks, as it were the midwives of Providence.

Well, that shall be to-morrow. Meanwhile there is still to-day, and each one of its quiet hours seems very precious. I wonder what my new friends like to read. Suppose--I was going to say suppose it is _The Rosary_; but I won't suppose that, for when it comes to supposing, why not suppose something that isn't _The Rosary_? Why not, for instance, suppose they like _Eminent Victorians_, and that we three are going to sit of an evening delicately tickling each other with quotations from it, and gently squirming in our seats for pleasure? It is just as easy to suppose that as to suppose anything else, and as I'm not yet acquainted with these ladies' tastes one supposition is as likely to be right as another.

I don't know, though--I forgot their petticoats. I can't believe any friends of Mr. Lytton Strachey wear that kind of petticoat, eminently Victorian even though it be; and although he wouldn't, of course, have direct ocular proof that they did unless he had stood with me yesterday at the bottom of that wall while they on the top held up their skirts, still what one has on underneath does somehow ooze through into one's behaviour. I know once, when impelled by a heat wave in America to cast aside the undergarments of a candid mind and buy and put on pink chiffon, the pink chiffon instantly got through all my clothes into my conduct, which became curiously dashing. Anybody can tell what a woman has got on underneath by merely watching her behaviour. I have known just the consciousness of silk stockings, worn by one accustomed only to wool, produce dictatorialness where all before had been submission.

_August 19th_

I haven't written for three days because I have been so busy settling down to my guests.

They call each other Kitty and Dolly. They explained that these were inevitably their names because they were born, one fifty, the other forty years ago. I inquired why this was inevitable, and they drew my attention to fashions in names, asserting that people's ages could generally be guessed by their Christian names. If, they said, their birth had taken place ten years earlier they would have been Ethel and Maud; if ten years later they would have been Muriel and Gladys; and if twenty years only ago they had no doubt but what they would have been Elizabeth and Pamela. It is always Mrs. Barnes who talks; but the effect is as though they together were telling me things, because of the way Mrs. Jewks smiles,--I conclude in agreement.

'Our dear parents, both long since dead,' said Mrs. Barnes, adjusting her eyeglasses more comfortably on her nose, 'didn't seem to remember that we would ever grow old, for we weren't even christened Katharine and Dorothy, to which we might have reverted when we ceased being girls, but we were Kitty and Dolly from the very beginning, and actually in that condition came away from the font.'

'I like being Dolly,' murmured Mrs. Jewks.

Mrs. Barnes looked at her with what I thought was a slight uneasiness, and rebuked her. 'You shouldn't,' she said. 'After thirty-nine no woman should willingly be Dolly.'

'I still feel exactly _like_ Dolly,' murmured Mrs. Jewks.

'It's a misfortune,' said Mrs. Barnes, shaking her head. 'To be called Dolly after a certain age is bad enough, but it is far worse to feel like it. What I think of,' she said, turning to me, 'is when we are really old,--in bath chairs, unable to walk, and no doubt being spoon fed, and yet obliged to continue to be called by these names. It will rob us of dignity.'

'I don't think I'll mind,' murmured Mrs. Jewks. 'I shall still feel exactly _like_ Dolly.'

Mrs. Barnes looked at her, again I thought with uneasiness--with, really, an air of rather anxious responsibility.

And afterwards, when her sister had gone indoors for something, she expounded a theory she said she held, the soundness of which had often been proved to her by events, that names had much influence on behaviour.

'Not half as much,' I thought (but didn't say), 'as underclothes.' And indeed I have for years been acquainted with somebody called Trixy, who for steady gloom and heaviness of spirit would be hard to equal. Also I know an Isolda; a most respectable married woman, of a sprightly humour and much nimbleness in dodging big emotions.

'Dolly,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'has never, I am sorry to say, shared my opinion. If she had, many things in her life would have been different, for then she would have been on her guard as I have been. I am glad to say there is nothing I have ever done since I ceased to be a child that has been even remotely compatible with being called Kitty.'

I said I thought that was a great deal to be able to say. It suggested, I said, quite an unusually blameless past. Through my brain ran for an instant the vision of that devil who, seeking his tail, met Antoine in the passage. I blushed. Fortunately Mrs. Barnes didn't notice.

'What did Dol--what did Mrs. Jewks do,' I said, 'that you think was the direct result of her Christian name? Don't tell me if my question is indiscreet, which I daresay it is, because I know I often am, but your theory interests me.'

Mrs. Barnes hesitated a moment. She was, I think, turning over in her mind whether she would give herself the relief of complete unreserve, or continue for a few more days to skim round on the outskirts of confidences. This was yesterday. After all, she had only been with me two days.

She considered awhile, then decided that two days wasn't long enough, so only said: 'My sister is sometimes a little rash,--or perhaps I should say has been. But the effects of rashness are felt for a long time; usually for the rest of one's life.'

'Yes,' I agreed; and thought ruefully of some of my own.

This, however, only made me if anything more inquisitive as to the exact nature and quality of Dolly's resemblance to her name. We all, I suppose (except Mrs. Barnes, who I am sure hasn't), have been rash, and if we could induce ourselves to be frank much innocent amusement might be got by comparing the results of our rashnesses. But Mrs. Barnes was unable at the moment to induce herself to be frank, and she returned to the subject she has already treated very fully since her arrival, the wonderful bracing air up here and her great and grateful appreciation of it.

To-day is Tuesday; and on Saturday evening,--the day they arrived back again, complete with their luggage, which came up in a cart round by the endless zigzags of the road while they with their peculiar dauntlessness took the steep short cuts,--we had what might be called an exchange of cards. Mrs. Barnes told me what she thought fit for me to know about her late husband, and I responded by telling her and her sister what I thought fit for them to know of my uncle the Dean.

There is such a lot of him that is fit to know that it took some time. He was a great convenience. How glad I am I've got him. A dean, after all, is of an impressive respectability as a relation. His apron covers a multitude of family shortcomings. You can hold him up to the light, and turn him round, and view him from every angle, and there is nothing about him that doesn't bear inspection. All my relations aren't like that. One at least, though he denies it, wasn't even born in wedlock. We're not sure about the others, but we're quite sure about this one, that he wasn't born altogether as he ought to have been. Except for his obstinacy in denial he is a very attractive person. My uncle can't be got to see that he exists. This makes him not able to like my uncle.

I didn't go beyond the Dean on Saturday night, for he had a most satisfying effect on my new friends. Mrs. Barnes evidently thinks highly of deans, and Mrs. Jewks, though she said nothing, smiled very pleasantly while I held him up to view. No Lord Mayor was produced on their side. I begin to think there isn't one. I begin to think their self-respect is simply due to the consciousness that they are British. Not that Mrs. Jewks says anything about it, but she smiles while Mrs. Barnes talks on immensely patriotic lines. I gather they haven't been in England for some time, so that naturally their affection for their country has been fanned into a great glow. I know all about that sort of glow. I have had it each time I've been out of England.

_August 20th._

Mrs. Barnes elaborated the story of him she speaks of always as Mr. Barnes to-day.

He was, she said, a business man, and went to the city every day, where he did things with hides: dried skins, I understood, that he bought and resold. And though Mr. Barnes drew his sustenance from these hides with what seemed to Mrs. Barnes great ease and abundance while he was alive, after his death it was found that, through no fault of his own but rather, she suggested, to his credit, he had for some time past been living on his capital. This capital came to an end almost simultaneously with Mr. Barnes, and all that was left for Mrs. Barnes to live on was the house at Dulwich, handsomely furnished, it was true, with everything of the best; for Mr. Barnes had disliked what Mrs. Barnes called fandangles, and was all for mahogany and keeping a good table. But you can't live on mahogany, said Mrs. Barnes, nor keep a good table with nothing to keep it on, so she wished to sell the house and retire into obscurity on the proceeds. Her brother-in-law, however, suggested paying guests; so would she be able to continue in her home, even if on a slightly different basis. Many people at that period were beginning to take in paying guests. She would not, he thought, lose caste. Especially if she restricted herself to real gentlefolk, who wouldn't allow her to feel her position.

It was a little difficult at first, but she got used to it and was doing very well when the war broke out. Then, of course, she had to stand by Dolly. So she gave up her house and guests, and her means were now very small; for somehow, remarked Mrs. Barnes, directly one wants to sell nobody seems to want to buy, and she had had to let her beautiful house go for very little--

'But why--' I interrupted; and pulled myself up.

I was just going to ask why Dolly hadn't gone to Mrs. Barnes and helped with the paying guests, instead of Mrs. Barnes giving them up and going to Dolly; but I stopped because I thought perhaps such a question, seeing that they quite remarkably refrain from asking me questions, might have been a little indiscreet at our present stage of intimacy. No, I can't call it intimacy,--friendship, then. No, I can't call it friendship either, yet; the only word at present is acquaintanceship.

_August 21st._

The conduct of my guests is so extraordinarily discreet, their careful avoidance of curiosity, of questions, is so remarkable, that I can but try to imitate. They haven't asked me a single thing. I positively thrust the Dean on them. They make no comment on anything either, except the situation and the view. We seem to talk if not only certainly chiefly about that. We haven't even got to books yet. I still don't know about _The Rosary_. Once or twice when I have been alone with Mrs. Barnes she has begun to talk of Dolly, who appears to fill most of her thoughts, but each time she has broken off in the middle and resumed her praises of the situation and the view. I haven't been alone at all yet with Dolly; nor, though Mr. Barnes has been dwelt upon in detail, have I been told anything about Mr. Jewks.

_August 22nd._

Impetuosity sometimes gets the better of me, and out begins to rush a question; but up to now I have succeeded in catching it and strangling it before it is complete. For perhaps my new friends have been very unhappy, just as I have been very unhappy, and they may be struggling out of it just as I am, still with places in their memories that hurt too much for them to dare to touch. Perhaps it is only by silence and reserve that they can manage to be brave.

There are no signs, though, of anything of the sort on their composed faces; but then neither, I think, would they see any signs of such things on mine. The moment as it passes is, I find, somehow a gay thing. Somebody says something amusing, and I laugh; somebody is kind, and I am happy. Just the smell of a flower, the turn of a sentence, anything, the littlest thing, is enough to make the passing moment gay to me. I am sure my guests can't tell by looking at me that I have ever been anything but cheerful; and so I, by looking at them, wouldn't be able to say that they have ever been anything but composed,--Mrs. Barnes composed and grave, Mrs. Jewks composed and smiling.

But I refuse now to jump at conclusions in the nimble way I used to. Even about Mrs. Barnes, who would seem to be an untouched monument of tranquillity, a cave of calm memories, I can no longer be sure. And so we sit together quietly on the terrace, and are as presentable as so many tidy, white-curtained houses in a decent street. We don't know what we've got inside us each of disorder, of discomfort, of anxieties. Perhaps there is nothing; perhaps my friends are as tidy and quiet inside as out. Anyhow up to now we have kept ourselves to ourselves, as Mrs. Barnes would say, and we make a most creditable show.

Only I don't believe in that keeping oneself to oneself attitude. Life is too brief to waste any of it being slow in making friends. I have a theory--Mrs. Barnes isn't the only one of us three who has theories--that reticence is a stuffy, hampering thing. Except about one's extremest bitter grief, which is, like one's extremest joy of love, too deeply hidden away with God to be told of, one should be without reserves. And if one makes mistakes, and if the other person turns out to have been unworthy of being treated frankly and goes away and distorts, it can't be helped,--one just takes the risk. For isn't anything better than distrust, and the slowness and selfish fear of caution? Isn't anything better than not doing one's fellow creatures the honour of taking it for granted that they are, women and all, gentlemen? Besides, how lonely....

_August 23rd._

The sun goes on blazing, and we go on sitting in the shade in a row.

Mrs. Barnes does a great deal of knitting. She knits socks for soldiers all day. She got into this habit during the war, when she sent I don't know how many pairs a year to the trenches, and now she can't stop. I suppose these will go to charitable institutions, for although the war has left off there are, as Mrs. Jewks justly said, still legs in the world.

This remark I think came under the heading Dolly in Mrs. Barnes's mind, for she let her glance rest a moment on her sister in a kind of affectionate concern.

Mrs. Jewks hasn't said much yet, but each time she has said anything I have liked it. Usually she murmurs, almost as if she didn't want Mrs. Barnes to hear, yet couldn't help saying what she says. She too knits, but only, I think, because her sister likes to see her sitting beside her doing it, and never for long at a time. Her chief occupation, I have discovered, is to read aloud to Mrs. Barnes.

This wasn't done in my presence the first four days out of consideration for me, for everybody doesn't like being read to, Mrs. Barnes explained afterwards; but they went upstairs after lunch to their rooms,--to sleep, as I supposed, knowing how well they do that, and it was only gradually that I realised, from the monotonous gentle drone coming through the window to where I lay below on the grass, that it wasn't Mrs. Barnes giving long drawn-out counsel to Mrs. Jewks on the best way to cope with the dangers of being Dolly, but that it was Mrs. Jewks reading aloud.

After that I suggested they should do this on the terrace, where it is so much cooler than anywhere else in the afternoon; so now, reassured that it in no way disturbs me--Mrs. Barnes's politeness and sense of duty as a guest never flags for a moment--this is what happens, and it happens in the mornings also. For, says Mrs. Barnes, how much better it is to study what persons of note have said than waste the hours of life saying things oneself.

They read biographies and histories, but only those, I gather, that are not recent; and sometimes, Mrs. Barnes said, they lighten what Mrs. Jewks described in a murmur as these more solid forms of fiction by reading a really good novel.

I asked Mrs. Barnes with much interest about the novel. What were the really good ones they had read? And I hung on the answer, for here was something we could talk about that wasn't either the situation or the view and yet was discreet.

'Ah,' she said, shaking her head, 'there are very few really good novels. We don't care, of course, except for the very best, and they don't appear to be printed nowadays.'

'I expect the very best are unprintable,' murmured Mrs. Jewks, her head bent over her knitting, for it was one of the moments when she too was engaged on socks.

'There used to be very good novels,' continued Mrs. Barnes, who hadn't I think heard her, 'but of recent years they have indeed been few. I begin to fear we shall never again see a Thackeray or a Trollope. And yet I have a theory--and surely these two writers prove it--that it is possible to be both wholesome and clever.'

'I don't want to see any more Thackerays and Trollopes,' murmured Mrs. Jewks. 'I've seen them. Now I want to see something different.'

This sentence was too long for Mrs. Barnes not to notice, and she looked at me as one who should say, 'There. What did I tell you? Her name unsettles her.'

There was a silence.

'Our father,' then said Mrs. Barnes, with so great a gravity of tone that for a moment I thought she was unaccountably and at eleven o'clock in the morning going to embark on the Lord's Prayer, 'knew Thackeray. He mixed with him.'

And as I wasn't quite sure whether this was a rebuke for Dolly or information for me, I kept quiet.

As, however, Mrs. Barnes didn't continue, I began to feel that perhaps I was expected to say something. So I did.

'That,' I said, 'must have been very--'

I searched round for an enthusiastic word, but couldn't find one. It is unfortunate how I can never think of any words more enthusiastic than what I am feeling. They seem to disappear; and urged by politeness, or a desire to please, I frantically hunt for them in a perfectly empty mind. The nearest approach to one that I found this morning was Enjoyable. I don't think much of Enjoyable. It is a watery word; but it was all I found, so I said it. 'That must have been very enjoyable,' I said; and even I could hear that my voice was without excitement.

Mrs. Jewks looked at me and smiled.

'It was more than enjoyable,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'it was elevating. Dolly used to feel just as I do about it,' she added, her eye reproachfully on her sister. 'It is not Thackeray's fault that she no longer does.'

'It's only because I've finished with him,' said Mrs. Jewks apologetically. 'Now I want something _different_.'

'Dolly and I,' explained Mrs. Barnes to me, 'don't always see alike. I have a theory that one doesn't finish with the Immortals.'

'Would you put Thackeray--' I began diffidently.

Mrs. Barnes stopped me at once.

'Our father,' she said--again my hands instinctively wanted to fold--'who was an excellent judge, indeed a specialist if I may say so, placed him among the Immortals. Therefore I am content to leave him there.'

'But isn't that filial piety rather than--' I began again, still diffident but also obstinate.

'In any case,' interrupted Mrs. Barnes, raising her hand as though I were the traffic, 'I shall never forget the influence he and the other great writers of the period had upon the boys.'

'The boys?' I couldn't help inquiring, in spite of this being an interrogation.

'Our father educated boys. On an unusual and original system. Being devoid of the classics, which he said was all the better because then he hadn't to spend any time remembering them, he was a devoted English linguist. Accordingly he taught boys English,--foreign boys, because English boys naturally know it already, and his method was to make them minutely acquainted with the great novels,--the great wholesome novels of that period. Not a French, or Dutch, or Italian boy but went home--'

'Or German,' put in Mrs. Jewks. 'Most of them were Germans.'

Mrs. Barnes turned red. 'Let us forget them,' she said, with a wave of her hand. 'It is my earnest desire,' she continued, looking at me, 'to forget Germans.'

'Do let us,' I said politely.

'Not one of the boys,' she then went on, 'but returned to his country with a knowledge of the colloquial English of the best period, and of the noble views of that period as expressed by the noblest men, unobtainable by any other method. Our father called himself a Non-Grammarian. The boys went home knowing no rules of grammar, yet unable to talk incorrectly. Thackeray himself was the grammar, and his characters the teachers. And so was Dickens, but not quite to the same extent, because of people like Sam Weller who might have taught the boys slang. Thackeray was immensely interested when our father wrote and told him about the school, and once when he was in London he invited him to lunch.'

Not quite clear as to who was in London and which invited which, I said, 'Who?'

'It was our father who went to London,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'and was most kindly entertained by Thackeray.'

'He went because he wasn't there already,' explained Mrs. Jewks.

'Dolly means,' said Mrs. Barnes, 'that he did not live in London. Our father was an Oxford man. Not in the narrow, technical meaning that has come to be attached to the term, but in the simple natural sense of living there. It was there that we were born, and there that we grew up in an atmosphere of education. We saw it all round us going on in the different colleges, and we saw it in detail and at first hand in our own home. For we too were brought up on Thackeray and Dickens, in whom our father said we would find everything girls needed to know and nothing that, they had better not.'

'I used to have a perfect _itch_,' murmured Mrs. Jewks, 'to know the things I had better not.'

And Mrs. Barnes again looked at me as one who should say, 'There. What did I tell you? Such a word, too. Itch.'

There was a silence. I could think of nothing to say that wouldn't appear either inquisitive or to be encouraging Dolly.

Mrs. Barnes sits between us. This arrangement of our chairs on the grass happened apparently quite naturally the first day, and now has become one that I feel I mustn't disturb. For me to drop into the middle chair would somehow now be impossible. It is Mrs. Barnes's place. Yet I do want to sit next to Mrs. Jewks and talk to her. Or better still, go for a walk with her. But Mrs. Barnes always goes for the walks, either with or without me, but never without Mrs. Jewks. She hasn't yet left us once alone together. If anything needs fetching it is Mrs. Jewks who fetches it. They don't seem to want to write letters, but if they did I expect they would both go in to write them at the same time.

I do think, though, that we are growing a little more intimate. At least to-day we have talked of something that wasn't the view. I shouldn't be surprised if in another week, supposing the hot weather lasts so long, I shall be asking Mrs. Barnes outright what it is Dolly did that has apparently so permanently unnerved her sister.

But suppose she retaliated by asking me,--oh, there are so many things she could ask me that I couldn't answer! Except with the shameful, exposing answer of beginning very helplessly to cry....

_August 24th._

Last night I ran after Mrs. Jewks just as she was disappearing into her room and said, 'I'm going to call you Dolly. I don't like Jewks. How do you spell it?'

'What--Dolly?' she asked, smiling.

'No--Jewks.'

But Mrs. Barnes came out of her bedroom and said, 'Did we forget to bid you goodnight? How very remiss of us.'

And we all smiled at each other, and went into our rooms, and shut the doors.

_August 25th._

The behaviour of time is a surprising thing. I can't think how it manages to make weeks sometimes seem like minutes and days sometimes seem like years. Those weeks I was here alone seemed not longer than a few minutes. These days since my guests came seem to have gone on for months.

I suppose it is because they have been so tightly packed. Nobody coming up the path and seeing the three figures sitting quietly on the terrace, the middle one knitting, the right-hand one reading aloud, the left-hand one sunk apparently in stupor, would guess that these creatures' days were packed. Many an honest slug stirred by creditable desires has looked more animate than we. Yet the days _are_ packed. Mine, at any rate, are. Packed tight with an immense monotony.

Every day we do exactly the same things: breakfast, read aloud; lunch, read aloud; tea, go for a walk; supper, read aloud; exhaustion; bed. How quick and short it is to write down, and how endless to live. At meals we talk, and on the walk we talk, or rather we say things. At meals the things we say are about food, and on the walk they are about mountains. The rest of the time we don't talk, because of the reading aloud. That fills up every gap; that muzzles all conversation.

I don't know whether Mrs. Barnes is afraid I'll ask questions, or whether she is afraid Dolly will start answering questions that I haven't asked; I only know that she seems to have decided that safety lies in putting an extinguisher on talk. At the same time she is most earnest in her endeavours to be an agreeable guest, and is all politeness; but so am I, most earnest for my part in my desire to be an agreeable hostess, and we are both so dreadfully polite and so horribly considerate that things end by being exactly as I would prefer them not to be.

For instance, finding Merivale--it is Merivale's _History of the Romans under the Empire_ that is being read--finding him too much like Gibbon gone sick and filled with water, a Gibbon with all the kick taken out of him, shorn of his virility and his foot-notes, yesterday I didn't go and sit on the terrace after breakfast, but took a volume of the authentic Gibbon and departed by the back door for a walk.

It is usually, I know, a bad sign when a hostess begins to use the back door, but it wasn't a sign of anything in this case except a great desire to get away from Merivale. After lunch, when, strengthened by my morning, I prepared to listen to some more of him, I found the chairs on the terrace empty, and from the window of Mrs. Barnes's room floated down the familiar muffled drone of the first four days.

So then I went for another walk, and thought. And the result was polite affectionate protests at tea-time, decorated with some amiable untruths about domestic affairs having called me away--God forgive me, but I believe I said it was the laundress--and such real distress on Mrs. Barnes's part at the thought of having driven me off my own terrace, that now so as to shield her from thinking anything so painful to her I must needs hear Merivale to the end.

'Dolly,' I said, meeting her by some strange chance alone on the stairs going down to supper--invariably the sisters go down together--'do you like reading aloud?'

I said it very quickly and under my breath, for at the bottom of the stairs would certainly be Mrs. Barnes.

'No,' she said, also under her breath.

'Then why do you do it?'

'Do you like listening?' she whispered, smiling.

'No,' I said.

'Then why do you do it?'

'Because--' I said. 'Well, because--'

She nodded and smiled. 'Yes,' she whispered, 'that's my reason too.'

_August 26th._

All day to-day I have emptied myself of any wishes of my own and tried to be the perfect hostess. I have given myself up to Mrs. Barnes, and on the walk I followed where she led, and I made no suggestions when paths crossed though I have secret passionate preferences in paths, and I rested on the exact spot she chose in spite of knowing there was a much prettier one just round the corner, and I joined with her in admiring a view I didn't really like. In fact I merged myself in Mrs. Barnes, sitting by her on the mountain side in much the spirit of Wordsworth, when he sat by his cottage fire without ambition, hope or aim.

_August 27th._

The weather blazes along in its hot beauty. Each morning, the first thing I see when I open my eyes is the great patch of golden light on the wall near my bed that means another perfect day. Nearly always the sky is cloudless--a deep, incredible blue. Once or twice, when I have gone quite early to my window towards the east, I have seen what looked to my sleepy eyes like a flock of little angels floating slowly along the tops of the mountains, or at any rate, if not the angels themselves, delicate bright tufts of feathers pulled out of their wings. These objects, on waking up more completely, I have perceived to be clouds; and then I have thought that perhaps that day there would be rain. But there never has been rain.

The clouds have floated slowly away to Italy, and left us to another day of intense, burning heat.

I don't believe the weather will ever break up. Not, anyhow, for a long time. Not, anyhow, before I have heard Merivale to the end.

_August 28th._

In the morning when I get up and go and look out of my window at the splendid east I don't care about Merivale. I defy him. And I make up my mind that though my body may be present at the reading of him so as to avoid distressing Mrs. Barnes and driving her off the terrace--we are minute in our care not to drive each other off the terrace--my ears shall be deaf to him and my imagination shall wander. Who is Merivale, that he shall burden my memory with even shreds of his unctuous imitations? And I go down to breakfast with a fortified and shining spirit, as one who has arisen refreshed and determined from prayer, and out on the terrace I do shut my ears. But I think there must be chinks in them, for I find my mind is much hung about, after all, with Merivale. Bits of him. Bits like this.

_Propertius is deficient in that light touch and exquisitely polished taste which volatilize the sensuality and flattery of Horace. The playfulness of the Sabine bard is that of the lapdog, while the Umbrian reminds us of the pranks of a clumsier and less tolerated quadruped._

This is what you write if you want to write like Gibbon, and yet remain at the same time a rector and chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons; and this bit kept on repeating itself in my head like a tune during luncheon to-day. It worried me that I couldn't decide what the clumsier and less tolerated quadruped was.

'A donkey,' said Mrs. Jewks, on my asking my guests what they thought.

'Surely yes--an ass,' said Mrs. Barnes, whose words are always picked.

'But why should a donkey be less tolerated than a lapdog?' I asked. 'I would tolerate it more. If I might tolerate only one, it would certainly be the donkey.'

'Perhaps he means a flea,' suggested Mrs. Jewks.

'Dolly,' said Mrs. Barnes.

'But fleas do go in for pranks, and are less tolerated than lapdogs,' said Mrs. Jewks.

'Dolly,' said Mrs. Barnes again.

'Except that,' I said, not heeding Mrs. Barnes for a moment in my pleasure at having got away from the usual luncheon-table talk of food, 'haven't fleas got more than four legs?'

'That's centipedes,' said Dolly.

'Then it's two legs that they've got.'

'That's birds,' said Dolly.

We looked at each other and began to laugh. It was the first time we had laughed, and once we had begun we laughed and laughed, in that foolish way one does about completely idiotic things when one knows one oughtn't to and hasn't for a long while.

There sat Mrs. Barnes, straight and rocky, with worried eyes. She never smiled; and indeed why should she? But the more she didn't smile the more we laughed,--helplessly, ridiculously. It was dreadful to laugh, dreadful to mention objects that distressed her as vulgar; and because it was dreadful and we knew it was dreadful, we couldn't stop. So was I once overcome with deplorable laughter in church, only because a cat came in. So have I seen an ill-starred woman fall a prey to unseasonable mirth at a wedding. We laughed positively to tears. We couldn't stop. I did try to. I was really greatly ashamed. For I was doing what I now feel in all my bones is the thing Mrs. Barnes dreads most,--I was encouraging Dolly.

Afterwards, when we had settled down to Merivale, and Dolly finding she had left the book upstairs went in to fetch it, I begged Mrs. Barnes to believe that I wasn't often quite so silly and didn't suppose I would be like that again.

She was very kind, and laid her hand for a moment on mine,--such a bony hand, marked all over, I thought as I looked down at it, with the traces of devotion and self-sacrifice. That hand had never had leisure to get fat. It may have had it in the spacious days of Mr. Barnes, but the years afterwards had certainly been lean ones; and since the war, since the selling of her house and the beginning of the evidently wearing occupation of what she had called standing by Dolly, the years, I understand, have been so lean that they were practically bone.

'I think,' she said, 'I have perhaps got into the way of being too serious. It is because Dolly, I consider, is not serious enough. If she were more so I would be less so, and that would be better for us both. Oh, you musn't suppose,' she added, 'that I cannot enjoy a joke as merrily as anybody.' And she smiled broadly and amazingly at me, the rockiest, most determined smile.

'There wasn't any joke, and we were just absurd,' I said penitently, in my turn laying my hand on hers. 'Forgive me. I'm always sorry and ashamed when I have behaved as though I were ten. I do try not to, but sometimes it comes upon one unexpectedly--'

'Dolly is a little old to behave as though she were ten,' said Mrs. Barnes, in sorrow rather than in anger.

'And I'm a little old too. It's very awkward when you aren't so old inside as you are outside. For years I've been trying to be dignified, and I'm always being tripped up by a kind of apparently incurable natural effervescence.'

Mrs. Barnes looked grave.