The Enchanted April
“I do think,” said the freckled one, “that she wants nothing except
quiet.”
And perhaps the freckled one pulled the one with the hand by the
sleeve, for the hold on Scrap’s forehead relaxed, and after a minute’s
silence, during which no doubt she was being contemplated—she was
always being contemplated—the footsteps began to scrunch the pebbles
again, and grew fainter, and were gone.
“Lady Caroline has a headache,” said Mrs. Arbuthnot, re-entering the
dining-room and sitting down in her place next to Mrs. Fisher. “I can’t
persuade her to have even a little tea, or some black coffee. Do you
know what aspirin is in Italian?”
“The proper remedy for headaches,” said Mrs. Fisher firmly, “is castor
oil.”
“But she hasn’t got a headache,” said Mrs. Wilkins.
“Carlyle,” said Mrs. Fisher, who had finished her omelette and had
leisure, while she waited for the next course, to talk, “suffered at
one period terribly from headaches, and he constantly took castor oil
as a remedy. He took it, I should say, almost to excess, and called it,
I remember, in his interesting way the oil of sorrow. My father said it
coloured for a time his whole attitude to life, his whole philosophy.
But that was because he took too much. What Lady Caroline wants is one
dose, and one only. It is a mistake to keep on taking castor oil.”
“Do you know the Italian for it?” asked Mrs. Arbuthnot.
“Ah, that I’m afraid I don’t. However, she would know. You can ask
her.”
“But she hasn’t got a headache,” repeated Mrs. Wilkins, who was
struggling with the maccaroni. “She only wants to be let alone.”
They both looked at her. The word shovel crossed Mrs. Fisher’s mind in
connection with Mrs. Wilkins’s actions at that moment.
“Then why should she say she has?” asked Mrs. Arbuthnot.
“Because she is still trying to be polite. Soon she won’t try, when the
place has got more into her—she’ll really be it. Without trying.
Naturally.”
“Lotty, you see,” explained Mrs. Arbuthnot, smiling to Mrs. Fisher, who
sat waiting with a stony patience for her next course, delayed because
Mrs. Wilkins would go on trying to eat the maccaroni, which must be
less worth eating than ever now that it was cold; “Lotty, you see, has
a theory about this place—”
But Mrs. Fisher had no wish to hear any theory of Mrs. Wilkins’s.
“I am sure I don’t know,” she interrupted, looking severely at Mrs.
Wilkins, “why you should assume Lady Caroline is not telling the
truth.”
“I don’t assume—I know,” said Mrs. Wilkins.
“And pray how do you know?” asked Mrs. Fisher icily, for Mrs. Wilkins
was actually helping herself to more maccaroni, offered her officiously
and unnecessarily a second time by Francesca.
“When I was out there just now I saw inside her.”
Well, Mrs. Fisher wasn’t going to say anything to that; she wasn’t
going to trouble to reply to downright idiocy. Instead she sharply
rapped the little table-gong by her side, though there was Francesca
standing at the sideboard, and said, for she would wait no longer for
her next course, “Serve me.”
And Francesca—it must have been wilful—offered her the maccaroni again.
Chapter 10
There was no way of getting into or out of the top garden at San
Salvatore except through the two glass doors, unfortunately side by
side, of the dining-room and the hall. A person in the garden who
wished to escape unseen could not, for the person to be escaped from
would be met on the way. It was a small, oblong garden, and concealment
was impossible. What trees there were—the Judas tree, the tamarisk, the
umbrella-pine—grew close to the low parapets. Rose bushes gave no real
cover; one step to right or left of them, and the person wishing to be
private was discovered. Only the north-west corner was a little place
jutting out from the great wall, a kind of excrescence or loop, no
doubt used in the old distrustful days for observation, where it was
possible to sit really unseen, because between it and the house was a
thick clump of daphne.
Scrap, after glancing round to see that no one was looking, got up and
carried her chair into this place, stealing away as carefully on tiptoe
as those steal whose purpose is sin. There was another excrescence on
the walls just like it at the north-east corner, but this, though the
view from it was almost more beautiful, for from it you could see the
bay and the lovely mountains behind Mezzago, was exposed. No bushes
grew near it, nor had it any shade. The north-west loop then was where
she would sit, and she settled into it, and nestling her head in her
cushion and putting her feet comfortably on the parapet, from whence
they appeared to the villagers on the piazza below as two white doves,
thought that now indeed she would be safe.
Mrs. Fisher found her there, guided by the smell of her cigarette. The
incautious Scrap had not thought of that. Mrs. Fisher did not smoke
herself, and all the more distinctly could she smell the smoke of
others. The virile smell met her directly she went out into the garden
from the dining-room after lunch in order to have her coffee. She had
bidden Francesca set the coffee in the shade of the house just outside
the glass door, and when Mrs. Wilkins, seeing a table being carried
there, reminded her, very officiously and tactlessly Mrs. Fisher
considered, that Lady Caroline wanted to be alone, she retorted—and
with what propriety—that the garden was for everybody.
Into it accordingly she went, and was immediately aware that Lady
Caroline was smoking. She said to herself, “These modern young women,”
and proceeded to find her; her stick, now that lunch was over, being no
longer the hindrance to action that it was before her meal had been
securely, as Browning once said—surely it was Browning? Yes, she
remembered how much diverted she had been—roped in.
Nobody diverted her now, reflected Mrs. Fisher, making straight for the
clump of daphne; the world had grown very dull, and had entirely lost
its sense of humour. Probably they still had their jokes, these
people—in fact she knew they did, for _Punch_ still went on; but how
differently it went on, and what jokes. Thackeray, in his inimitable
way, would have made mincemeat of this generation. Of how much it
needed the tonic properties of that astringent pen it was of course
unaware. It no longer even held him—at least, so she had been
informed—in any particular esteem. Well, she could not give it eyes to
see and ears to hear and a heart to understand, but she could and would
give it, represented and united in the form of Lady Caroline, a good
dose of honest medicine.
“I hear you are not well,” she said, standing in the narrow entrance of
the loop and looking down with the inflexible face of one who is
determined to do good at the motionless and apparently sleeping Scrap.
Mrs. Fisher had a deep voice, very like a man’s, for she had been
overtaken by that strange masculinity that sometimes pursues a woman
during the last laps of her life.
Scrap tried to pretend that she was asleep, but if she had been her
cigarette would not have been held in her fingers but would have been
lying on the ground.
She forgot this. Mrs. Fisher did not, and coming inside the loop, sat
down on a narrow stone seat built out of the wall. For a little she
could sit on it; for a little, till the chill began to penetrate.
She contemplated the figure before her. Undoubtedly a pretty creature,
and one that would have had a success at Farringford. Strange how
easily even the greatest men were moved by exteriors. She had seen with
her own eyes Tennyson turn away from everybody—turn, positively, his
back on a crowd of eminent people assembled to do him honour, and
withdraw to the window with a young person nobody had ever heard of,
who had been brought there by accident and whose one and only merit—if
it be a merit, that which is conferred by chance—was beauty. Beauty!
All over before you can turn round. An affair, one might almost say, of
minutes. Well, while it lasted it did seem able to do what it liked
with men. Even husbands were not immune. There had been passages in the
life of Mr. Fisher . . .
“I expect the journey has upset you,” she said in her deep voice. “What
you want is a good dose of some simple medicine. I shall ask Domenico
if there is such a thing in the village as castor oil.”
Scrap opened her eyes and looked straight at Mrs. Fisher.
“Ah,” said Mrs. Fisher, “I knew you were not asleep. If you had been
you would have let your cigarette fall to the ground.”
Scrap threw the cigarette over the parapet.
“Waste,” said Mrs. Fisher. “I don’t like smoking for women, but I still
less like waste.”
“What _does_ one do with people like this?” Scrap asked herself, her
eyes fixed on Mrs. Fisher in what felt to her an indignant stare but
appeared to Mrs. Fisher as really charming docility.
“Now you’ll take my advice,” said Mrs. Fisher, touched, “and not
neglect what may very well turn into an illness. We are in Italy, you
know, and one has to be careful. You ought, to begin with, to go to
bed.”
“I never go to bed,” snapped Scrap; and it sounded as moving, as
forlorn, as that line spoken years and years ago by an actress playing
the part of Poor Jo in dramatised version of Bleak House—“I’m always
moving on,” said Poor Jo in this play, urged to do so by a policeman;
and Mrs. Fisher, then a girl, had laid her head on the red velvet
parapet of the front row of the dress circle and wept aloud.
It was wonderful, Scrap’s voice. It had given her, in the ten years
since she came out, all the triumphs that intelligence and wit can
have, because it made whatever she said seem memorable. She ought, with
a throat formation like that, to have been a singer, but in every kind
of music Scrap was dumb except this one music of the speaking voice;
and what a fascination, what a spell lay in that. Such was the
loveliness of her face and the beauty of her colouring that there was
not a man into whose eyes at the sight of her there did not leap a
flame of intensest interest; but, when he heard her voice, the flame in
that man’s eyes was caught and fixed. It was the same with every man,
educated and uneducated, old, young, desirable themselves or
undesirable, men of her own world and bus-conductors, generals and
Tommies—during the war she had had a perplexing time—bishops equally
with vergers—round about her confirmation startling occurrences had
taken place—wholesome and unwholesome, rich and penniless, brilliant or
idiotic; and it made no difference at all what they were, or how long
and securely married: into the eyes of every one of them, when they saw
her, leapt this flame, and when they heard her it stayed there.
Scrap had had enough of this look. It only led to difficulties. At
first it had delighted her. She had been excited, triumphant. To be
apparently incapable of doing or saying the wrong thing, to be
applauded, listened to, petted, adored wherever she went, and when she
came home to find nothing there either but the most indulgent proud
fondness—why, how extremely pleasant. And so easy, too. No preparation
necessary for this achievement, no hard work, nothing to learn. She
need take no trouble. She had only to appear, and presently say
something.
But gradually experiences gathered round her. After all, she had to
take trouble, she had to make efforts, because, she discovered with
astonishment and rage, she had to defend herself. That look, that
leaping look, meant that she was going to be grabbed at. Some of those
who had it were more humble than others, especially if they were young,
but they all, according to their several ability, grabbed; and she who
had entered the world so jauntily, with her head in the air and the
completest confidence in anybody whose hair was grey, began to