The Enchanted April
curbed, for no one could live for four weeks in any real comfort with
somebody who had a habit.
She glanced at Mrs. Arbuthnot, and her parted hair and gentle brow
reassured her. No; it was accident, not habit, that had produced those
echoes. She could as soon imagine a dove having tiresome habits as Mrs.
Arbuthnot. Considering her, she thought what a splendid wife she would
have been for poor Carlyle. So much better than that horrid clever
Jane. She would have soothed him.
“Then shall we go?” she suggested.
“Let me help you up,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, all consideration.
“Oh, thank you—I can manage perfectly. It’s only sometimes that my
stick prevents me—”
Mrs. Fisher got up quite easily; Mrs. Arbuthnot had hovered over her
for nothing.
“_I’m_ going to have one of these gorgeous oranges,” said Mrs. Wilkins,
staying where she was and reaching across to a black bowl piled with
them. “Rose, how can you resist them. Look—have this one. Do have this
beauty—” And she held out a big one.
“No, I’m going to see to my duties,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, moving
towards the door. “You’ll forgive me for leaving you, won’t you,” she
added politely to Mrs. Fisher.
Mrs. Fisher moved towards the door too; quite easily; almost quickly;
her stick did not hinder her at all. She had no intention of being left
with Mrs. Wilkins.
“What time would you like to have lunch?” Mrs. Arbuthnot asked her,
trying to keep her head as at least a non-guest, if not precisely a
hostess, above water.
“Lunch,” said Mrs. Fisher, “is at half-past twelve.”
“You shall have it at half-past twelve then,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot.
“I’ll tell the cook. It will be a great struggle,” she continued,
smiling, “but I’ve brought a little dictionary—”
“The cook,” said Mrs. Fisher, “knows.”
“Oh?” said Mrs. Arbuthnot.
“Lady Caroline has already told her,” said Mrs. Fisher.
“Oh?” said Mrs. Arbuthnot again.
“Yes. Lady Caroline speaks the kind of Italian cooks understand. I am
prevented going into the kitchen because of my stick. And even if I
were able to go, I fear I shouldn’t be understood.”
“But—” began Mrs. Arbuthnot.
“But it’s _too_ wonderful,” Mrs. Wilkins finished for her from the
table, delighted with these unexpected simplifications in her and
Rose’s lives. “Why, we’ve got positively nothing to do here, either of
us, except just be happy. You wouldn’t believe,” she said, turning her
head and speaking straight to Mrs. Fisher, portions of orange in either
hand, “how terribly good Rose and I have been for years without
stopping, and how much now we need a perfect rest.”
And Mrs. Fisher, going without answering her out of the room, said to
herself, “She must, she shall be curbed.”
Chapter 8
Presently, when Mrs. Wilkins and Mrs. Arbuthnot, unhampered by any
duties, wandered out and down the worn stone steps and under the
pergola into the lower garden, Mrs. Wilkins said to Mrs. Arbuthnot, who
seemed pensive, “Don’t you see that if somebody else does the ordering
it frees us?”
Mrs. Arbuthnot said she did see, but nevertheless she thought it rather
silly to have everything taken out of their hands.
“I love things to be taken out of my hands,” said Mrs. Wilkins.
“But we found San Salvatore,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, “and it is rather
silly that Mrs. Fisher should behave as if it belonged only to her.”
“What is rather silly,” said Mrs. Wilkins with much serenity, “is to
mind. I can’t see the least point in being in authority at the price of
one’s liberty.”
Mrs. Arbuthnot said nothing to that for two reasons—first, because she
was struck by the remarkable and growing calm of the hitherto
incoherent and excited Lotty, and secondly because what she was looking
at was so very beautiful.
All down the stone steps on either side were periwinkles in full
flower, and she could now see what it was that had caught at her the
night before and brushed, wet and scented, across her face. It was
wistaria. _Wistaria and sunshine_ . . . she remembered the
advertisement. Here indeed were both in profusion. The wistaria was
tumbling over itself in its excess of life, its prodigality of
flowering; and where the pergola ended the sun blazed on scarlet
geraniums, bushes of them, and nasturtiums in great heaps, and
marigolds so brilliant that they seemed to be burning, and red and pink
snapdragons, all outdoing each other in bright, fierce colour. The
ground behind these flaming things dropped away in terraces to the sea,
each terrace a little orchard, where among the olives grew vines on
trellises, and fig-trees, and peach-trees, and cherry-trees. The
cherry-trees and peach-trees were in blossom—lovely showers of white
and deep rose-colour among the trembling delicacy of the olives; the
fig-leaves were just big enough to smell of figs, the vine-buds were
only beginning to show. And beneath these trees were groups of blue and
purple irises, and bushes of lavender, and grey, sharp cactuses, and
the grass was thick with dandelions and daisies, and right down at the
bottom was the sea. Colour seemed flung down anyhow, anywhere; every
sort of colour, piled up in heaps, pouring along in rivers—the
periwinkles looked exactly as if they were being poured down each side
of the steps—and flowers that grow only in borders in England, proud
flowers keeping themselves to themselves over there, such as the great
blue irises and the lavender, were being jostled by small, shining
common things like dandelions and daisies and the white bells of the
wild onion, and only seemed the better and the more exuberant for it.
They stood looking at this crowd of loveliness, this happy jumble, in
silence. No, it didn’t matter what Mrs. Fisher did; not here; not in
such beauty. Mrs. Arbuthnot’s discomposure melted out of her. In the
warmth and light of what she was looking at, of what to her was a
manifestation, an entirely new side of God, how could one be
discomposed? If only Frederick were with her, seeing it too, seeing as
he would have seen it when first they were lovers, in the days when he
saw what she saw and loved what she loved. . .
She sighed.
“You mustn’t sigh in heaven,” said Mrs. Wilkins. “One doesn’t.”
“I was thinking how one longs to share this with those one loves,” said
Mrs. Arbuthnot.
“You mustn’t long in heaven,” said Mrs. Wilkins. “You’re supposed to be
quite complete there. And it is heaven, isn’t it, Rose? See how
everything has been let in together—the dandelions and the irises, the
vulgar and the superior, me and Mrs. Fisher—all welcome, all mixed up
anyhow, and all so visibly happy and enjoying ourselves.”
“Mrs. Fisher doesn’t seem happy—not visibly, anyhow,” said Mrs.
Arbuthnot, smiling.
“She’ll begin soon, you’ll see.”
Mrs. Arbuthnot said she didn’t believe that after a certain age people
began anything.
Mrs. Wilkins said she was sure no one, however old and tough, could
resist the effects of perfect beauty. Before many days, perhaps only
hours, they would see Mrs. Fisher bursting out into every kind of
exuberance. “I’m quite sure,” said Mrs. Wilkins, “that we’ve got to
heaven, and once Mrs. Fisher realises that that’s where she is, she’s
bound to be different. You’ll see. She’ll leave off being ossified, and
go all soft and able to stretch, and we shall get quite—why, I
shouldn’t be surprised if we get quite fond of her.”
The idea of Mrs. Fisher bursting out into anything, she who seemed so
particularly firmly fixed inside her buttons, made Mrs. Arbuthnot
laugh. She condoned Lotty’s loose way of talking of heaven, because in
such a place, on such a morning, condonation was in the very air.
Besides, what an excuse there was.
And Lady Caroline, sitting where they had left her before breakfast on
the wall, peeped over when she heard laughter, and saw them standing on
the path below, and thought what a mercy it was they were laughing down
there and had not come up and done it round her. She disliked jokes at
all times, but in the morning she hated them; especially close up;
especially crowding in her ears. She hoped the originals were on their
way out for a walk, and not on their way back from one. They were
laughing more and more. What could they possibly find to laugh at?
She looked down on the tops of their heads with a very serious face,
for the thought of spending a month with laughers was a grave one, and
they, as though they felt her eyes, turned suddenly and looked up.
The dreadful geniality of those women. . .
She shrank away from their smiles and wavings, but she could not shrink
out of sight without falling into the lilies. She neither smiled nor
waved back, and turning her eyes to the more distant mountains surveyed
them carefully till the two, tired of waving, moved away along the path
and turned the corner and disappeared.
This time they both did notice that they had been met with, at least,
unresponsiveness.
“If we weren’t in heaven,” said Mrs. Wilkins serenely, “I should say we
had been snubbed, but as nobody snubs anybody there of course we can’t
have been.”
“Perhaps she is unhappy,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot.
“Whatever it is she is she’ll get over it here,” said Mrs. Wilkins with
conviction.
“We must try and help her,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot.
“Oh, but nobody helps anybody in heaven. That’s finished with. You
don’t try to be, or do. You simply _are_.”
Well, Mrs. Arbuthnot wouldn’t go into that—not here, not to-day. The
vicar, she knew, would have called Lotty’s talk levity, if not
profanity. How old he seemed from here; an old, old vicar.
They left the path, and clambered down the olive terraces, down and
down, to where at the bottom the warm, sleepy sea heaved gently among
the rocks. There a pine-tree grew close to the water, and they sat
under it, and a few yards away was a fishing-boat lying motionless and
green-bellied on the water. The ripples of the sea made little gurgling
noises at their feet. They screwed up their eyes to be able to look
into the blaze of light beyond the shade of their tree. The hot smell
from the pine-needles and from the cushions of wild thyme that padded
the spaces between the rocks, and sometimes a smell of pure honey from
a clump of warm irises up behind them in the sun, puffed across their
faces. Very soon Mrs. Wilkins took her shoes and stockings off, and let
her feet hang in the water. After watching her a minute Mrs. Arbuthnot
did the same. Their happiness was then complete. Their husbands would
not have known them. They left off talking. They ceased to mention
heaven. They were just cups of acceptance.
Meanwhile Lady Caroline, on her wall, was considering her position. The
garden on the top of the wall was a delicious garden, but its situation
made it insecure and exposed to interruptions. At any moment the others
might come and want to use it, because both the hall and the
dining-room had doors opening straight into it. Perhaps, thought Lady
Caroline, she could arrange that it should be solely hers. Mrs. Fisher
had the battlements, delightful with flowers, and a watch-tower all to
herself, besides having snatched the one really nice room in the house.
There were plenty of places the originals could go to—she had herself
seen at least two other little gardens, while the hill the castle stood
on was itself a garden, with walks and seats. Why should not this one
spot be kept exclusively for her? She liked it; she liked it best of
all. It had the Judas tree and an umbrella pine, it had the freesias
and the lilies, it had a tamarisk beginning to flush pink, it had the
convenient low wall to sit on, it had from each of its three sides the
most amazing views—to the east the bay and mountains, to the north the
village across the tranquil clear green water of the little harbour and